Resistance to Sex: The 4 Different Flavors

Yesterday's article about when you should have sex mentioned part of a female reader's comment on the article "I Don’t Chase 'Em, I Replace 'Em." The comment, though, was actually a fair bit longer than that, and touched on another subject too:

“While I agree that the 'replace' mentality is efficient for picking up large quantities of women in a short time, I think it limits the quality of the women. I can categorically say, that there is a strong correlation between a woman's desirability status and the extent to which she will require a man to chase or demonstrate interest/value.”

Our commenter here has a very valid point - however, the nuance to that point is what interests us most.

Because, as you will see, how resistant to sex a woman is depends upon:

• The quality and quantity of her choice with men, and
• How this man in particular stacks up against her other options
  

... and that even among resistances, there are very different kinds of resistance to sex, and these are based far more on the woman's level of sexual experience with men, and her level of experience with a man who makes her feel the way this particular man does.

(if you're looking for an article on how to overcome this resistance, we've already got a great post up on it here - "How to Get a Girl in Bed: 10 Crucial Tips for Making Her Yours" - this piece is really about identifying the different kinds of resistance, understanding what each sort says about the girl you're getting it from, and understanding what you need to do and who you need to be not to get it)

Let's dive in.

In the "How to Get a Girl in Bed" article, we explored in a good amount of detail the emotional reservations women often have prior to sleeping with a man for the first time. It's often a big decision, and there's a lot that's unknown and uncertain going in.

However, the very best answer to the question of, "Why did she resist sex with me?" is this: somewhere along the line, you made a mistake.

Because at least one of the following is true whenever a woman resists intimacy:

• She doesn't feel completely comfortable and at ease with you
• She doesn't feel turned on enough by or enough sexual tension with you
• She hasn't ruled you out completely as a boyfriend candidate
• She isn't 100% confidence there will be no consequences after (e.g. social, etc.)
  
• You mismanaged her emotional cresting and failed to transition properly
• Your physical escalation is clumsy and unresponsive to her signals
• She has some other reservation unrelated to you (an injury, on her period, etc.)

Erase all of those - be a compellingly sexy man who puts her totally at ease and removes any concern of her friends ever finding out, while not being in the running for being a boyfriend at all, managing emotions and transitions perfectly, and escalating perfectly - and she doesn't have anything weird going on in her life - and resistance never appears.

For the sake of this article though, we'll assume you're still working on tweaking your process with women and your sexy vibe down, and you run into resistance every now and again with women you're at the point of physical escalation to sex with.

What does that resistance mean?

Well, there are three "meta-categories" of resistance, primarily:

1. Flat-out refusal. That's from a girl who's 100% certain she does not want to sleep with you and is not interested. You'll rarely run into this one, simply because women who are 100% not interested in sleeping with you typically don't go home alone with men, or invite those men to come back to their homes alone, either. However, if you make a BIG mistake somewhere between transitioning and getting somewhere alone with her though, a woman may change her mind from uncertain about sex to certain she doesn't want it with you, and you'll see this then. Thus, when you see outright refusal, it's usually a sign that somewhere very recently you made a BIG mistake. You will usually not be able to turn this around - so thank her for a wonderful evening, head home, reflect on what you did wrong, and do it better with the next girl.

2. Partial resistance. This is where she'll permit you to escalate to a certain point - running your hands up and down her body, say, or taking her shirt off - but not let you get past that point - e.g., her bra comes off easy but she shuts you down every time you go for her pants. This kind of resistance is the resistance you get from a girl who's on the fence about you - she thinks she might want to, but isn't completely sure. This is the kind we'll be talking about in this post.

3. Token resistance. This is resistance that isn't genuine at all, but is more "for the sake of appearances." This resistance is very easily overcome, and usually only works out to a few sentences uttered like, "We shouldn't be doing this," or, "Can't we just go to sleep?" and perhaps a few half-hearted removals of your hands while escalating, but after a few minutes the resistance is history and escalation proceeds without a hitch. Token resistance taken at face value can lead to some pretty disappointed and angry women (i.e., a girl gives some token resistance simply to not appear too easy, assuming the man will persist, but he immediately gives up, assuming she's refusing him, and she ends up not getting laid despite that being what she wanted with him and thought he would give her).

Again, if you're getting flat-out refusal, you've messed up horribly along the lines and it isn't happening... just walk away and don't waste your time.

And if you're getting token resistance or no resistance at all, congratulations - you're running one tight ship, seduction-wise (or you're so out of her league that she's too afraid of refusing you and losing her only shot at going to bed with you, or she's a very sexually liberated woman who's simply very comfortable with sex).

What we'll be talking about in this article is the partial resistance to sex you see - the resistance where a girl is willing to let things proceed to some level, because she does like you, but she struggles with you to prevent it going further than that... until later.

Quantity and Quality

Just as men can have different levels of abundance mentality - ranging from:

• Women are impossible to get, and incredibly rare, precious resources, to

• Women of average quality are easy to sleep with, but high quality girlfriends are incredibly rare, precious resources, to

• Women of the highest quality are easy to get, and women are abundant resources

... that greatly effect their behavior with women (the guy for whom women are completely scarce moves very slowly with women, tolerates any kind of behavior from women because he is too afraid of losing women if he doesn't tolerate it, white knights hard, and gets upset at men treating women any way other than how he thinks men should treat women, because women are such precious resources that must be taken care of; while the guy for whom women are abundant resources moves very quickly with women, immediately moves on from women who don't behave in ways conducive to them becoming lovers and having a nice, rewarding, peaceful relationship, finds the idea of white knighting amusing and mystifying, and is bemused by men upset at how he treats women, since women clearly enjoy him and value him so much that they chase after him and become frustrated when they can't get him)...

... so too can women have different levels of abundance mentality, depending on the primary environment (the culture and city she lives in) and the secondary environment (the subculture and venue / situation / scenario she's in).

I've lived in cities where there are lots of attractive men with reasonably good game and noticeably more single men than single women. It's very hard to game in these cities! They're fantastic training grounds, but you don't start seeing reliable, consistent success with girls there until you transform yourself into the absolute crème de la crème - the most smolderingly sexy, engrossingly captivating, undeniably charming man those women have even met. Even then, they still slow things down, put the brakes on, and make it harder for you, simply because they can - they have tons of choice and plenty of options.

Conversely, I've lived in cities where most of the male population was not sexy, not captivating, and not charming at all, most of the men didn't even approach women, and the single young women outnumbered the single young men by a good amount. In those cities, even the guys with clumsy game clean up.

The New York Times has a fantastic piece that looks at what it's like in some of these topsy-turvy upside-down worlds where single women vastly outnumber single men - interesting read if you have a moment:

The New Math on Campus: On College Campuses, a Shortage of Men

Here's an excerpt:

““If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.

Since that is not her style, Ms. Deray said, she has still not had a long-term relationship in college. As a fashion merchandising major, she said, she can only hope the odds improve when she graduates and moves to New York.

At colleges in big cities, women do have more options. “By my sophomore year, I just had the feeling that there is nobody in this school that I could date,” said Ashley Crisostomo, a senior at Fordham University in New York, which is 55 percent female. She has tended to date older professionals in the city.”

This is a primary environment problem: the fewer the men are, the more in control they are. Likewise, when it's women who are fewer, the women have more power. (for the record, if you're considering what school you'd like to go to and have things the easiest, Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas is 90.3% female, and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City has an 82.5% female enrollment ratio - you can see more here: Highest Female-to-Male Ratio: Large Colleges and Universities; New York City itself has about 200,000+ more single women than single men)

But secondary environments have their own effects on things. For instance, I used to live in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C., which, at the time I lived there in 2006, was approximately 60% female (it's slightly more male than female these days). Yet, if you went to the biggest nightclub in Arlington then - a place called the Clarendon Ballroom - you'd typically find the patronage there about 75% male, and the women present would act far more aloof than they would if you met them during the day or at a different bar (although, still not impossible to pick up!). If you went to one of the salsa-dancing lessons at the salsa bar (forget the name) on the other hand, where it was perhaps 75% female sometimes, you'd find the women were very friendly.

All this factors into a woman's resistance to sex - whether it's last minute resistance before the sex act in your apartment, or resistance to coming back to your home because she knows what that means... and she'd rather make things take longer. And as we discussed in yesterday's article, it's usually better for women to delay sex (and for men to make it happen as quickly as possible).

When environmental factors (abundant men) are in women's favor, women have higher resistance to sex; when they are not in women's favor (scarce men), women have lower resistance to sex.

You'll usually find the best places to meet women are places that have more women than men, where the men are not very aggressive in pursuing women.

The 4 Kinds of Resistance to Sex

You're out on your first date with a girl, and it's gone great. You invite her back to your place, and she agrees - she comes with you. But when the two of you get back, after a few minutes of letting her get comfortable, and you begin to escalate things with her, working off the knowledge that first-date sex is actually your best shot at getting together with this girl at all, period... she resists.

A lot of men make blanket assumptions that a woman who resists sex is harder to get, and thus higher quality - they assume that if she resists sex with them, she resists sex with everyone, and if she goes to be easily with them, she goes to be easily with everyone.

This is never true, but for different reasons, depending on your skill level with women.

• If you are unskilled with women, women who resist sex with you do so because you're not particularly sexually exciting or skilled at getting past that resistance - however, they may not be so resistant with more enticing, able men

• If you are skilled with women, women who go to bed with you quickly often do so because you present such a rare opportunity for them (mate-choice-wise) and because you are so good at disarming their resistance - you frequently end up taking to bed women quickly who've never gone to bed quickly with another man, and may never do so again

Thus, while it's fairly common for men everywhere from beginner to advanced to assume that speed-to-bed is some kind of reliable metric of "quality," it's not.

It's simply a metric of how more or less experienced with sex and sexy suitors than you she is.

Further, you can identify her level of sexual experience roughly by gauging the kind of resistance to sex she presents for you. If you recall our diagram from "How Many Partners Has Your Girlfriend Had? Find Out Here," there are four categories of sex experience we broke women down into (and yes, it goes both ways - the same categories apply to men, too) - here's the diagram again:

(and before anyone gets upset and climbs up on a soapbox to announce that sexual histories don't matter, this study found that a woman's infidelity risk increases by 7% with every sexual partner she has. I'm sure there's a similar correlation between partner counts and infidelity risks for men too, but I haven't seen the research)

Each of these types of women responds differently to sexual advances she wants to resist. Those resistances look like this:

1. Nervousness / uncertainty / trembling: this is a girl who's sexually inexperienced. She's only gone to bed with 1 or 2 partners before - or perhaps even none - and even if she really likes you, sex itself scares her.

2. Discomfort / stiffness / weirdness: you'll see this with women who know sex and know what it means, but they're starting to be more familiar with men and know that sex is a loaded gun - they aren't as terrified by sex as the less experienced girls, but they have a reasonable understanding that when and how sex happens can mean very different things for their potential relationship.

3. Annoyance / irritation / frustration: this one's a funny one, and it's a sign of an angry / cynical girl. She's familiar with sex, she knows the deal, she's sexually experienced, but now she has a specific place she wants you in her life - as a guy who wines her and dines her for four dates before he makes a move, say, or as a strictly platonic friend - and she's annoyed that you aren't following the "program."

4. Calmness / control / smoothness: you'll only see this with very sexually experienced women - women who are somewhere around 20 lovers plus. They've made their peace with the fact that men are the aggressors and will push for sex - someone's got to do it - and that not all men want the same things with them that they want with those men (she may want him as a friend, he may want her as a lover). Because they're comfortable with sex, and they know the drill, they're able to shut most men's advances down calmly, coolly, and adroitly, in such a natural way that the man doesn't even realize he's being shut down, and maybe even feels good about it.

However, there's a catch: as you go up in experience and certainty, the level of experience and certainty required for women to give you these kinds of resistances goes up too.

That is to say, if you're very experienced with women, and very certain in your abundance mentality, a girl who may resist most men's advances with frustration and annoyance because they don't "get it" and because those men are easily replaced (e.g., she's the dominant one, deciding what roles each of them takes, and is irked they aren't responding as they should) may revert to stiffness and weirdness with you because she doesn't know how to respond and doesn't feel in control - she realizes she may actually lose you if she doesn't go to bed with you, and she isn't sure if she can accept losing you (whereas with other, less experienced men, who don't come across as quite so amazing, she gets none of these feelings).

So, these reactions are not a completely foolproof metric of partner count, although they are pretty good; but, they are a near-flawless metric of how experienced a woman is compared to you and how certain she is that she can replace you.

You'll get:

• Nervousness if she's far less experienced / less certain than you are
• Discomfort if she's somewhat less experienced / less certain than you are
• Annoyance if she's somewhat more experienced / more certain than you are
• Calmness if she's far more experienced / more certain than you are

So how do we use this, and what does it tell us about a woman who's giving us one of these different kinds of resistances?

You can tell a lot about a woman by the kind of resistance she gives you.

Namely, you can get:

• A good read on her level of absolute sexual experience / number of partners
• A great read on her level of sexual experience relative to your own
• A great read on her level of confidence that she can easily replace you

We'll go into a bit more detail on each of the different flavors of resistance, and what each one means.

The Nervous Girl: Sexually Inexperienced

The girl who's legitimately nervous - you invite her home or move to kiss her or touch her body, and she gives you some of the following signs:

• She glances nervously to the side, breaking eye contact

• She hesitates before speaking, unsure what to say to you

• She shows uncertainty about what to do through her words and voice tone

• Her resistance comes in defiant, very girly "no"s - clutching her clothes close and shaking her head, or tensing her body up as if preparing for an attack

Women react this way only when they're very sexually inexperienced - they have low (or zero) partner counts. When a girl gives very nervous resistance to sex, it's almost always a universal sign that she's highly inexperienced.

Just about the only time you'll see it with girls who aren't in the 0 to 2 partner count range is when she views you as massively out of her league and would like you as a boyfriend and normally makes boyfriends wait but knows that if she turns you down for sex she probably doesn't get that - in other words, you've reached a point where her standard practice is to shut the guy down, but she realizes she probably loses you forever if she does that with you. However, that one's rare - you'll only see it if you're dating down in a big way, OR you're rich / famous / a rock star, OR you're reasonably advanced in your fundamentals and pretty smooth with women and you're in a foreign country and dealing with women who normally never meet or date attractive foreigners (e.g., you're a really sexy, smooth Greek man meeting ordinary English girls in England who aren't used to meeting men of your caliber, let alone foreign men of your caliber; or, you're a really sexy, smooth English man meeting ordinary Greek girls in Greece who aren't used to meeting men of your caliber, let alone foreign men of your caliber). There, you may see moderately experienced women behaving like inexperienced women.

Usually though, you'll only meet very inexperienced women behaving this way. If sex is scary for her, sex is new for her.

With this type of resistance, your best bet is gradual but consistent escalation, and dealing with the girl very gently and nice. Plenty of pauses in the escalation; plenty of stopping and staring into her eyes. Make sure that you're not directly on top of her at any point until she's completely committed to the escalation; you want to make sure she feels like she has plenty of space if she needs to make a quick getaway. Remember, sex is new and scary; if you make her feel trapped, she'll freak out and leave. She needs to be able to relax a bit as you escalate with her.

Word of advice: be very responsible with women this nervous about sex. When girls are this nervous, they're communicating to you that they're placing an immense amount of importance on intimacy with you - which means if you're only doing a one-night stand, that should be very clearly (but gently) communicated, and you may want to consider not doing it at all. Girls this inexperienced have a lot of preconceptions about sexy, charming, mysterious men, and if all you want is a quick roll in the hay you may end up doing quite a bit of damage to them. Have a think about whether you want to affect someone else that way, and if you want that on your conscience before you do.

The Uncomfortable Girl: "This Might Be Too Soon..."

The girl whose resistance to sex spans the range of awkward and uncomfortable - but not annoyed - reactions will give you the following signs:

• She looks at you like you're a creepy guy for escalating with her

• She crosses her arms and gets stiff body language, but it's more "awkward stiff" than "nervous stiff" (like what inexperienced girls give you... "nervous stiff" is actually kind of cute, but "awkward stiff" isn't really)

• She shows hesitation about what to do - she thinks the two of you should probably do one thing, but she isn't 100% on that

• She blurts out her real and honest reasons for wanting to delay things: "But if we do it too soon, you won't want to see me anymore..." "But if we do it too soon, you'll think I'm too easy..."

The uncomfortable girl is communicating through her actions to you that she isn't ready to rule out sex completely, but she thinks it's probably better if it doesn't happen now.

To any talented seducer - who trains himself to do things with certainty - this isn't terribly difficult to overcome; when someone else thinks the two of you probably shouldn't do something, but you think the two of you absolutely SHOULD do the opposite thing, you're going to win out. The higher level of certainty nearly always prevails - that's the power of frame control.

When you see girls getting uncomfortable in the face of sex, it usually means they're moderately experienced - 3 to 7 sex partners, about - though that can be higher if you're a very attractive / out-of-their-league guy. Normally though, this behavior denotes a woman who has learned from experience that sex happening too quickly usually doesn't get her what she wants, but she's not certain that's the case and that she ought to say "no."

The cute thing about girls who are uncomfortable is that they'll very often honestly and logically state out their reasons for resisting sex: "But you won't like me if we have sex too soon!" - which makes it easy for you to work through those issues with her. Like so - with you speaking in a tone that's part sexy voice, part fatherly figure:

Girl: But if we have sex too fast, you'll think I'm easy!

You: Are you kidding? The last two girlfriends I had we slept together on the first date. If we sleep together fast, the only thing I'm going to think is that you are an incredibly intelligent woman who found me so sexy she obviously could not resist.

Girl: But it's too soon...!

You: Too soon for what? Ordinary guys who think that women who play hard to get are higher quality? I'll tell you a secret... the girls who are the very best at playing hard to get are actually the girls who've already been gotten by enough men that they've learned how to play hard to get.

In this way, you can actually paint being "hard to get" as a signature of very sexually experienced women - which, as a matter of fact, is often true!

Interestingly enough though, most men AND women don't realize this.

It's one of the hidden secrets of the world of seduction. The more adept she is at resisting, quite often, the more experienced with men she is.

The Annoyed Girl: You're Not Following Her Plan

The girl who shows irritation, frustration, and annoyance in response to you trying to escalate things - whether that's to move her somewhere sitting down with you, to take her home with you, or to kiss her or get physical with her while you are alone - tends to present the following signs:

• She stares at you, peeved and irritated

• She sighs before speaking, or rolls her eyes

• She shows annoyance via her voice and actions, as if dealing with a child

• Her resistance comes in irked, mother-like, "No, Steeeve... we are not having sex," tones, as though her patience is running out

The annoyed girl doesn't get why you don't get it. You're supposed to wait until the third date before you do this... or, you're supposed to wait your turn in the kindly-and-supportive platonic male friend zone role until / unless she needs you to be more than that. Weren't you paying attention when they assigned you your role?

Girls who give you annoyed / irritated resistance to sex are usually in the roughly 7 to 19 partners range, and they view sex (and men) somewhat cynically. They're upset to learn that men and women don't want exactly the same things, and they're annoyed that men don't want what they want them to want. Occasionally - very rarely, but occasionally - you'll encounter extremely inexperienced girls (usually virgins) who act this way because they're know-it-alls who THINK they know everything about sex without having any actual experience. This is pretty rare, but you'll run into it every now and then in very religious areas that are very anti-sex-before-marriage. These girls can give you, "Gosh, doesn't he KNOW it doesn't go this way? Sex isn't until after marriage - hello!" reactions even though they're in totally unfamiliar situations for them simply because they've spent so much time absorbing others' viewpoints about it that it feels old hat, even though it's not. Once this girl is physically intimate with a man though, her attitude often swings in the opposite extreme (i.e., resistance disappears more or less completely and she gets a little sex-crazed - I've met girls like this who switched from staunchly, vehemently anti-sex to having partner counts of 25+ within a year or two of having sex for the first time).

An annoyed girl's resistance is an irritated response to her lack of control... she wanted and expected things to go a certain way, but along comes this guy who won't get with the program - or maybe even never got a copy of the program in the first place. But she knows the deal - why doesn't he?

(The deal of course being that she only hooks up fast with a certain sort of man under certain conditions, and because this man is not that man and these conditions are not those conditions, he needs to take things slow and become her boyfriend and/or not make a move and just be friends until she wants him to be something more)

This kind of resistance is a sign that a girl considers herself "above" you in some way (possibly, you made some mistakes throughout the interaction that caused herself to compare herself against you and decide that she's more experienced with dating / sex; but sometimes she's simply narcissistic and views herself as being above everybody); either way, I suggest taking this as a red flag, laughing it off, and leaving, never to return, call, or text. A girl in one of the other three categories is a much better bet for your mental and emotional well-being than the girl who gets teed you won't toe her party line.

The Calm Girl: She's Seen It All Before

The calm girl is the one who's totally cool, relaxed, and collected in the face of even your most passionate, effective escalation attempts - and looks just like this:

• She makes calm, cool, confident eye contact with you

• She speaks casually, with sometimes a hint of laughter about her voice

• She shows clarity, certainty, and measured control when she speaks

• Her resistance comes in deft, almost imperceptible deflections of all your advances, an expert waltz that results in you confused at how she's so perfectly shut you down without being clumsy, awkward, or rude

The calm girl isn't out to make you feel bad or look bad. In fact, she may even want to sleep with you - but on her terms, not yours. She's used to getting what she wants with men - in fact, she nearly always gets it.

She knows you like her, and she knows you want her, and the way she sees it, she's got you wrapped around her little finger. Which is no insult to you - that's the way all men are with her.

The calm girl is typically a sexually experienced woman who's been with somewhere north of 20 sexual partners. Sometimes it's more - sometimes a woman doesn't get completely at ease until closer to 25 or 30 partners. But somewhere in the low double-digits, she's seen everything that most men will ever throw at her, and makes her peace with it. This is men; men are horny, men want sex, and men try to get sex the way they try to get sex. She learns the countermeasures to stay in control and on-top of things; and she learns how to dodge their advances without causing a stir.

The best way to respond to the girl who calmly and adroitly deflects your advances is to be calm in turn. Be nonplussed that she's spurned your escalations; she'll be at least a little intrigue that you haven't freaked out, like many of the men she meets, or stepped up your efforts to try even harder, like most of the rest of the men she meets.

You usually won't sleep with a girl who's able to calmly and expertly shut you down on the first date, unless it's what she wants - if she's that able to close down your advances, she's running game on an entirely different - and higher - level than you are yet. But, you can learn from her, and if you're equally calm-but-persistent, and you continue to exude your sexy vibe, and you keep setting things up so that the two of you can get together, she may just let it happen at some point in the not-so-distant future.

When, that is, she decides it should happen.

What Resistance Styles Say About Her... and You

If you're not a seduction superstar yet, you can take the resistance styles / partner counts metric at roughly face value (unless you're in a band and she's a fan, or you're on travel in a country where you get sexy points, or she's a know-it-all who thinks she's more experienced than she is).

You can usually take resistance styles / experience as a good bet, although, again, sometimes you'll make a mistake and appear less experienced to a woman than you are, or you'll do things more perfectly than you usually do and appear more experienced to a woman than you are, or she has a superiority complex or an inferiority complex and sees her as better or lesser than most other people, in which case you'll get a different reception than you would by following the metric straight.

And you can always take resistance styles as signs of how replaceable (or not) a woman sees you as being. Women won't be hard with men they're scared to lose... and they won't be soft and womanly with men they're not afraid to.

The only thing resistance to sex DOESN'T tell you, just about, simply by its mere presence, is that a woman is a woman of "quality"... despite what most men and women seem to think. Whatever your definition of "quality" may be, resistance (successful or otherwise) usually doesn't determine it.

However, if you stop and look at the type of resistance you're getting - well now, you've just learned a whole lot more about her - and about how she sees you - than she realized she was letting on.

Ciao,
Chase