When I was 20, I went on a date with a guy from OKCupid. He was charming and did adventurous things. I agreed to go back to his place that night, and we had sex.

The morning after, I asked “how did you manage to have sex with me so fast?” and perhaps unwisely, he handed me a book on pickup artistry.

I read it and was fascinated. I started browsing forums, hanging out in seduction chatrooms, reading blogs. I loved the idea that there were strategies men could use to make me want to have sex with them. I really wanted to have sex, but often had this stupid gatekeeper thing in my brain that would shut down and prevent me from getting sex. Teaching men to do a magical series of moves that would manage to circumvent my gatekeeper and help get me laid was a wonderful thing, and I advised my male friends to try it.

I would go on dates and notice that guys—subconsciously or not—were using classic pickup artistry moves. I’d tell them what they were doing to their face, (“nice use of escalating kino” or “you just passed a shit-test, good job”) before going back to their apartment and having sex with them.

I view sex as a success for both of us, and thus seduction is a collaborative activity. We both want the same thing: to get around my annoying brain gatekeeper that got installed there by eons of evolution that doesn’t understand birth control and is trying to evaluate if you’re worthy of impregnating me. So please—use seduction techniques on me. Roleplay as an alpha male well enough to trick my vagina into believing that your cum will give me alpha sons.

A lot of the bad rap around seduction theory comes from attempting to have sex with women who don’t want to have casual sex. In this case, your drives are not in fact aligned, and seduction isn’t collaborative. If the only way you can have sex with a woman is signaling commitment that you don’t intend to give, then you should not be fucking her. Joke about how she’ll look in your bed, sure, but stay away from jokes about marriage.

I’m largely talking about casual sex here, but regardless of whether she’s looking to get laid or married, women generally want men to be more attractive. We are sick of being clumsily seduced.

I’m belaboring the point here because people often have an aversion to deliberately attempting to be seductive. We equate being intentionally sexy to tricking a woman somehow; that you as a man getting sex out of a woman means you’ve conquered her, and so to balance this out you have to avoid being too deliberate about attempting to have sex with her. We’re supposed to be authentic, right?

But my question is—authentic to what? I once read an opera teacher say that one of the most effective exercises in getting students to sing well was to ask them to pretend they were a professional opera singer. To some extent, pretending to be attractive is being attractive. It takes a lot of balls to pretend to seduce well, and balls are hot.

Lee Boo-jin, the daughter of a powerful Samsung chairman, married her bodyguard. Marrying outside of class lines like this was a big scandal; she was supposed to marry a high value man. But instead, it was one of her employees.

We can imagine that probably this employee was really seductive. He probably wasn’t intimidated by her higher position, or at least didn’t act like it. He must have carried himself as her equal somehow, despite actually being significantly poorer and less impressive than her. Culturally, we view narratives like this as romantic. We don’t view it as a poor man duping a powerful woman into sleeping with him via seduction techniques, we view it as the power of love conquering class gaps, or something.

In ancient cultures, maybe being insufficiently alpha was a real signal; it meant you were more likely to die in war or whatever, or that you’d fail to repel the invading tribe come to abduct your women. But today, paupers can marry princesses - if they know how to activate her vagina.

One of the best methods of seducing a woman is to reinforce her self image.

I learned how to be a seductive woman deep in the high-pressure semen mines of the camgirl world. There, you get ranked directly against other women for how efficiently you can convert your being to tips. Different behavior generates more or fewer tips, and you get slowly eroded down into the perfect female shape.

I’d get no end of people praising me for signaling nerdy or high-intellect niche shit, but in practice, my tips declined when I used more advanced vocabulary. I ended up plastering a custom-made poster behind my computer with a list of rules, one of them saying *talk slower, use smaller words.*This was a key lesson - I found that most men are less interested in actually being with an intelligent woman as much as they are being the kind of person who dates intelligent women. I learned to interpret people claiming they wanted something, as instead a desperate desire to be the kind of person who wants that something.

This is maybe the single most important core of human psychology - people want to reinforce narratives about themselves. If you’re marketing, don’t sell them a thing, sell them a self image that your thing happens to reinforce.