Original article at http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/02/under-guidance-of-pickup-artists-men-learn-how-to-pick-themselves-up-49208.html; author Daniel Victor
The group of 30 men looks out of place in the Pentagon City mall food court on Sunday afternoon. They're impeccably groomed, wearing designer jeans and expensive shoes. They range in age from early 20s to late 40s. At 2:30 p.m. they rise from their chairs and huddle in between the kiosks selling $8.99 earrings and 3-for-$25 sunglasses. Time to get started.
After a final pep talk, they fan across the mall. Each group has three to five amateurs and one professional guiding their way. Their mission is to approach and charm every woman on site. Get a few phone numbers if you can. They’re attendees of the Global Pickup Conference, and the students are here to learn from the masters.
They’re practicing a scorched-earth strategy for meeting women: Leave no stone unturned, leave no woman unflattered. Understand and embrace that very few of the women will actually give you their phone numbers. When rejections don’t hurt you, one phone number and 99 rejections is better than no phone numbers and no rejections.
Getting his team of four ready for action, Vince Kelvin, 43, author of Same Night Sex System, reminds them that the important thing is how you feel after the women walk away. If they reject you, they’re not ready for you. You’re better than them. You’re awesome. You need a woman who can handle you.
"We need daring women,” Kelvin tells the men. “Let's go find them!"
“But let's move away from the food court, because there's a lot of security here."
Then they depart on a three-hour adventure that will include one student commenting on a woman's underwear choices at Victoria's Secret while a professional listens in on a hidden device, and another student getting kicked out of Macy's for hitting on a 16-year-old. Such are the pitfalls when you're learning how to talk to women.
The conference's website makes some fascinating promises. On its Products page, it asks: “ARE YOU READY TO LAY EVERY GIRL YOU MEET?” Every girl, 100 percent. Perhaps this goal might be a tad ... unattainable. Think of all the women you encounter, at least in passing, every year. Business associates, waitresses, grocery shoppers, the Metro; we’re probably talking a few thousand women per year. And really, there are only so many hours in a day. At some point it just becomes burdensome.
The hyper-sexuality sells, but it’s actually not why most of the men say they paid $300 for two days of training at the Georgetown Holiday Inn and the mall excursion. There are a few attendees who are already doing well with women, and strive to be every-nighters. There are far more who lack conversational skills, work up a sweat before approaching women, and suffer from a paralyzing lack of self-confidence.
The gathering was organized by the quick-witted Speer, creator of The Speer Method, who looks like a less fit version of Johnny Depp. He asked if the students were there to learn how to have a lot of sex, and four men raised their hands. Asked if they wanted to learn how to eventually meet that one special someone, about 25 hands shot in the air. If they have more sex in the meantime, all the better.
Sex is merely the carrot; the whole event is a self-help conference in disguise. The pickup community – they call themselves "the community" for short – has veered away from scripted ruses and “negging,” a concept that teaches men to build attraction by making negative comments about a woman. Now they teach men that they just need the confidence to approach women, coupled with the ability to present how great they already are. And they state over and over: Don’t lie to women. Have a plan, but be yourself.
“Things will happen as long as you have personality, as long as she likes who you are, and as long as you’re not fake,” Speer tells the group. “Most women can see through this bullshit that we try to feed them. So the more bullshit you try to feed, the less successful you are with women.”
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The Tale of Miss M
When you work in retail, you make a lot of snap judgments about people, even if you don’t mean to. Everyday you’re faced with hundreds of customers in all shapes and sizes, customers who can either make or break your day. When they exit the doors of your store, they likely have very complex private lives that indicate their identities as multi-faceted human beings. But when all you know about them is the way they treat you in the span of a few minutes, it’s difficult not to make judgments about who they are. As an employee at a local gift store, I was certain I had a knack for understanding who my customers really were. I didn’t realize how wrong I was until the day I was faced with someone whose story disagreed with mine, despite the fact that we were making our judgments based on the very same information.
Our store played host to a handful of regulars, mostly older women who came in a few times a week while walking the mall. The most infamous of these regulars was Miss M, an 80-year-old woman who visited us once, sometimes twice a day EVERY SINGLE DAY of the week.
Miss M was a small woman with fragile, bone-sharp features. She had the heavy wrinkles of an elderly woman, but none of the customary fattening and softening that often comes with ages. She was thin and angular, and her dyed-brown hair was generally pulled into a tight bun and wrapped in an old-fashioned snood - a kind of fancy hairnet that held the bun in place. She wore expensive tailored blouses and pants, and several large diamonds on her fingers that she insisted on turning upside down so that they faced her palms because, as she put it, “You never know who might see it and decide to beat you up for it.” Her lips were thin and often pursed into a look of disapproval.
I was not a fan of Miss M, as you can probably tell from my description. To me, the expensive clothes and fancy rings were a means of showing off. “If she’s so afraid someone’s going to steal her ring, WHY does she WEAR IT??” I’d complain to my co-workers. “She WANTS someone to steal the damn thing, just so she can complain about it!”
But her upper-class presentation wasn’t the thing that really bothered me. I felt justified in hating Miss M because - in my eyes- she thought that she was better than us. She ordered us around and made absurd demands. On one particular occasion, she came into our store to purchase one of several glass oil lamps that we had on display in the window. She pulled me aside and told me that, while she liked the lamps we had on display, she really needed one to match her bathroom - one that came in a very specific shade of purplish-pink called “thistle.” When I explained that the lamps we had on display were the only ones available from the company, she told me that I needed to get on the phone right away and demand that they make her one in the specified color. “Miss M, I just can’t do that,” I said, trying to be polite but forceful. “They just don’t make them in any other color.”
“Just because they don’t RIGHT NOW doesn’t mean they CAN’T,” she said. “All of these lamps were clear at some point. I know how these things work. They just have to be told what to do; so call them and tell them.”
While I continued to insist that I couldn’t call the company for this special request, customers were piling up at the register and my coworker, Jenna, was motioning for me to come and help her. I tried to shoo Miss M away, but she insisted that I get her what she wanted. I told her that I would need to step into the back room and speak with the manager to see if calling the company would be possible. My plan was to gather my wits and find the best way to approach her before returning to the sales floor. But I had only been in back a few seconds when she marched through our Employees-Only door, told me she would be leaving, and that I was clearly “not in the shape to provide the best customer service” that day.
I was fuming. I ran to the front to help Jenna with customers, then reported to my manager about the situation with Miss M. “I just can’t stand her!” I whined. “She’s so demanding! She thinks she’s so much better than everyone, that we have to help her and ONLY her, not anyone else!”
Before I could finish my rant, my manager - a kindhearted woman I’d known for years - stopped me. “Sharon, she’s lonely. Haven’t you ever heard her talk about her children? She has five of them, and they’ve all moved away. Her husband died last year, and she’s clearly in the early stages of alzheimers. She just doesn’t know how to conduct herself. It isn’t badly intended. She just wants someone to pay attention to her, to talk to her for a while. And she wants to be helpful. She tells you all those things about calling the company because she really thinks she’s telling you something useful. She thinks the company SHOULD do what you’re asking. She thinks she’s helping you give better customer service.”
I was baffled. I’d spent weeks complaining to my coworkers and friends about the mean old wealthy woman who wanted nothing but to boss me around. And all that time, my manager had seen someone completely different - a helpless victim of loneliness and dementia, a fragile person who needed our help and our attention. We had been looking at the same person, had heard the same words, but had interpreted them completely differently. Through the story of Miss M, I realized how much our descriptions and stories are influenced by our opinions - and how easily those stories can be shaken by the presence of an opposing viewpoint.
Our store played host to a handful of regulars, mostly older women who came in a few times a week while walking the mall. The most infamous of these regulars was Miss M, an 80-year-old woman who visited us once, sometimes twice a day EVERY SINGLE DAY of the week.
Miss M was a small woman with fragile, bone-sharp features. She had the heavy wrinkles of an elderly woman, but none of the customary fattening and softening that often comes with ages. She was thin and angular, and her dyed-brown hair was generally pulled into a tight bun and wrapped in an old-fashioned snood - a kind of fancy hairnet that held the bun in place. She wore expensive tailored blouses and pants, and several large diamonds on her fingers that she insisted on turning upside down so that they faced her palms because, as she put it, “You never know who might see it and decide to beat you up for it.” Her lips were thin and often pursed into a look of disapproval.
I was not a fan of Miss M, as you can probably tell from my description. To me, the expensive clothes and fancy rings were a means of showing off. “If she’s so afraid someone’s going to steal her ring, WHY does she WEAR IT??” I’d complain to my co-workers. “She WANTS someone to steal the damn thing, just so she can complain about it!”
But her upper-class presentation wasn’t the thing that really bothered me. I felt justified in hating Miss M because - in my eyes- she thought that she was better than us. She ordered us around and made absurd demands. On one particular occasion, she came into our store to purchase one of several glass oil lamps that we had on display in the window. She pulled me aside and told me that, while she liked the lamps we had on display, she really needed one to match her bathroom - one that came in a very specific shade of purplish-pink called “thistle.” When I explained that the lamps we had on display were the only ones available from the company, she told me that I needed to get on the phone right away and demand that they make her one in the specified color. “Miss M, I just can’t do that,” I said, trying to be polite but forceful. “They just don’t make them in any other color.”
“Just because they don’t RIGHT NOW doesn’t mean they CAN’T,” she said. “All of these lamps were clear at some point. I know how these things work. They just have to be told what to do; so call them and tell them.”
While I continued to insist that I couldn’t call the company for this special request, customers were piling up at the register and my coworker, Jenna, was motioning for me to come and help her. I tried to shoo Miss M away, but she insisted that I get her what she wanted. I told her that I would need to step into the back room and speak with the manager to see if calling the company would be possible. My plan was to gather my wits and find the best way to approach her before returning to the sales floor. But I had only been in back a few seconds when she marched through our Employees-Only door, told me she would be leaving, and that I was clearly “not in the shape to provide the best customer service” that day.
I was fuming. I ran to the front to help Jenna with customers, then reported to my manager about the situation with Miss M. “I just can’t stand her!” I whined. “She’s so demanding! She thinks she’s so much better than everyone, that we have to help her and ONLY her, not anyone else!”
Before I could finish my rant, my manager - a kindhearted woman I’d known for years - stopped me. “Sharon, she’s lonely. Haven’t you ever heard her talk about her children? She has five of them, and they’ve all moved away. Her husband died last year, and she’s clearly in the early stages of alzheimers. She just doesn’t know how to conduct herself. It isn’t badly intended. She just wants someone to pay attention to her, to talk to her for a while. And she wants to be helpful. She tells you all those things about calling the company because she really thinks she’s telling you something useful. She thinks the company SHOULD do what you’re asking. She thinks she’s helping you give better customer service.”
I was baffled. I’d spent weeks complaining to my coworkers and friends about the mean old wealthy woman who wanted nothing but to boss me around. And all that time, my manager had seen someone completely different - a helpless victim of loneliness and dementia, a fragile person who needed our help and our attention. We had been looking at the same person, had heard the same words, but had interpreted them completely differently. Through the story of Miss M, I realized how much our descriptions and stories are influenced by our opinions - and how easily those stories can be shaken by the presence of an opposing viewpoint.
Jolie vs. Aniston
One of the primary narratives that the American media relies on to tell stories is the tale of good vs. evil. The notion that there are clear heroes and villains seeps into nearly every aspect of our lives - our wars, our elections, jobs. But there is perhaps no sector of public life more susceptible to the Good/Bad dichotomy than the world of celebrities. So in the early 2000’s, when the storybook relationship between media darling Jennifer Aniston and Hollywood Hunk Brad Pitt appeared to be in trouble, the tabloids were waiting in the wings to create a villain equal to Aniston’s victimized hero. In the ensuing months, Aniston was pitted against leading lady and newly-minted home-wrecker Angelina Jolie. The tabloid media used their powers of description to manufacture a war between two women, scripting Aniston as the hero and Jolie as the villain.
It was easy for journalists to frame Jolie as a monster. There is a fine line, in Hollywood, between “pretty,” “sexy,” and outwardly sexual. While starlets are expected to be beautiful, well-groomed, and to be attractive to the male gaze, they are NOT necessarily expected to act on their implied sexuality. Because Jolie had had relationships with Hollywood “bad boys” like Billy Bob Thornton, and because she had been very open about her sexual activity in the press in the past, the media quickly painted her as a slut and a harlot - a woman whose sexuality could not be contained. In addition, her roles in numerous action films - playing an aggressive and overtly sexual heroine - painted her as anything but innocent. It quickly became “obvious” that she had “stolen” Pitt from Aniston - that she had used her sexual prowess to charm the oblivious man. Tabloids also relied heavily on Jolie’s physical appearance to fit their narrative. In photos of the actress on InTouch and UsWeekly during the relevant time period, she is often seen wearing black or couched in leather and heavy eyeliner. Although black clothes and heavy makeup have always been part of Jolie’s trademark look, they were suddenly cited as proof of her villainy and overt sexuality.
Aniston was equally easy to frame as an innocent victim. While Jolie was known mostly for her roles as a badass action heroine, Aniston tended to play the part of the kind, innocent woman forever trapped in the romantic comedy universe, seeking a partner to fulfill her dreams. Even her most famous role - that of Rachel, on the series Friends - saw her seeking the long-term affections of a single man. She was seen as a woman seeking love and commitment, not a woman seeking mere sexual fulfillment. But in order to be the true jilted heroine, she needed to appear to be a “good girl” in real life as well as in films. The magazines quickly dug up photographs of Aniston looking sad and wistful - sometimes even tear-streaked. They printed shots in which she was bathed in halos of light that softened her skin and added glisten to her blonde locks. In contrast to Jolie, who wore the uniform of low-cut black dresses and tight leather, Aniston was usually pictured in conservative dresses with raised necklines. More often than not, she was seen sporting simple outfits in soft, light colors.
Even Pitt was painted into a very specific corner. In order for Jolie to be seen as the aggressive, scheming villain, Pitt had to appear relatively passive and easily manipulated. If he were given any agency or authority over his own decisions, then people might begin to question why he had left Anniston in the first place. Therefore, the tabloids began to seek photos of Pitt looking pretty but vapid, standing alongside a far more dominant-looking Jolie. Often in photos of the two together, Jolie can be seen facing the camera or looking up-and-out, while Pitt is often pictured looking down or away. The camera’s eye is generally focused on her rather than him, figuring her as the more dominant and important figure in the relationship.
It was easy for journalists to frame Jolie as a monster. There is a fine line, in Hollywood, between “pretty,” “sexy,” and outwardly sexual. While starlets are expected to be beautiful, well-groomed, and to be attractive to the male gaze, they are NOT necessarily expected to act on their implied sexuality. Because Jolie had had relationships with Hollywood “bad boys” like Billy Bob Thornton, and because she had been very open about her sexual activity in the press in the past, the media quickly painted her as a slut and a harlot - a woman whose sexuality could not be contained. In addition, her roles in numerous action films - playing an aggressive and overtly sexual heroine - painted her as anything but innocent. It quickly became “obvious” that she had “stolen” Pitt from Aniston - that she had used her sexual prowess to charm the oblivious man. Tabloids also relied heavily on Jolie’s physical appearance to fit their narrative. In photos of the actress on InTouch and UsWeekly during the relevant time period, she is often seen wearing black or couched in leather and heavy eyeliner. Although black clothes and heavy makeup have always been part of Jolie’s trademark look, they were suddenly cited as proof of her villainy and overt sexuality.
Aniston was equally easy to frame as an innocent victim. While Jolie was known mostly for her roles as a badass action heroine, Aniston tended to play the part of the kind, innocent woman forever trapped in the romantic comedy universe, seeking a partner to fulfill her dreams. Even her most famous role - that of Rachel, on the series Friends - saw her seeking the long-term affections of a single man. She was seen as a woman seeking love and commitment, not a woman seeking mere sexual fulfillment. But in order to be the true jilted heroine, she needed to appear to be a “good girl” in real life as well as in films. The magazines quickly dug up photographs of Aniston looking sad and wistful - sometimes even tear-streaked. They printed shots in which she was bathed in halos of light that softened her skin and added glisten to her blonde locks. In contrast to Jolie, who wore the uniform of low-cut black dresses and tight leather, Aniston was usually pictured in conservative dresses with raised necklines. More often than not, she was seen sporting simple outfits in soft, light colors.
Even Pitt was painted into a very specific corner. In order for Jolie to be seen as the aggressive, scheming villain, Pitt had to appear relatively passive and easily manipulated. If he were given any agency or authority over his own decisions, then people might begin to question why he had left Anniston in the first place. Therefore, the tabloids began to seek photos of Pitt looking pretty but vapid, standing alongside a far more dominant-looking Jolie. Often in photos of the two together, Jolie can be seen facing the camera or looking up-and-out, while Pitt is often pictured looking down or away. The camera’s eye is generally focused on her rather than him, figuring her as the more dominant and important figure in the relationship.
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