Insights from the Mind of a Seducer

Leaning forward on the counter, I listen intently to a friend of mine in the midst of a party. Her name is Ashley. We’d fooled around a few times and would often talk about having sex, but she’d always play a bit too hard to get or I’d get bored and move on to other bitties. We also shared a seductive annoyance at each other’s cockiness and respective bitchiness.

We discuss the recurring topic of our attraction for each other and the games we play to express it. I then joke about the absurdity of every social situation and how most people just act out the version of reality they tell themselves must be true (see, I talk to girls about more than just sex... sometimes).

She lightly teases me, “It always seems like you’re so calculating...”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, I can see the gears turning in your head.”

“Am I that obvious?”

“Well no, but most people aren’t as perceptive as me.”

See? Cocky. She was also very direct, either blatantly spilling her mind or feeding you lies draped in sardonicism. So, I definitely crushed on her. I mean, we had so much in common.

We continue sharing ideas about all the charades people put on in social situations. As we talk, a girl passes by us to get some beer from the fridge. Ashley scans the girl up and down, then looks at me, pointing to the girl, squints, then mouths to me, “Who is that?”

I shake my head and shrug. Seeing that I don’t know, she looks back at the girl. Then she plops down from her perch on the counter and pours herself a drink near the fridge. The girl’s eyes and body are turned from my friend, so Ashley takes the opportunity to scan the girl closely. Though she stares harder than your average creep at a club, there’s a calmness and curiosity to it that makes it natural.

Then, as the girl turns towards her, Ashley widens her eyes and subdues her body language by shrinking her shoulders and nodding down slightly so that she has to look up to make eye contact. An instant transition from “shameless staring” to “politely submissive”.

“Hey, I’ve never seen you before. I’m Ashley,” she says to the girl, extending her hand.

The girl turns towards my friend and they shake hands. A few brief exchanges later and Ashley comes back.

I chide her, “I saw the gears turning in your eyes, too. Everything about that was so... mechanical.”

She laughs and gives an impish smile of guilt.

The loud, pulsing base. Darkness. Strobe lights.

Girls out in packs, dressed up in skimpy, sequined outfits gyrating their hips on the dance floor or hovering about the bar, expressions of bored aloofness plastered across their faces.

Men wafting about in button-down shirts, buying drinks for themselves and their buddies, offering drinks to girls, slurring out lame, corny pickup lines and aggressive-but-clumsy attempts to feel her up later on in the night.

Tall, muscle-bound doormen looming over everything, the imminent threat of violent removal if you step out of line.

Silver-tongued bartenders serving infinite streams of patrons while stripping women away from their boyfriends or the men trying to pick them up with the ease of the years of day-in, day-out training in the nightlife environment.

The VIP section, empty sometimes, other times crowded with men and women sometimes laughing and drinking, but more often looking out over the rest of the nightclub and wondering how to get that fun to come to them.

For several decades the nightclub’s towered as Western society’s ultimate proving ground for the man on prowl: if he can pick up women here – here, where they look their best; where other men gather in droves to take their chances with them; where their walls are up higher than anywhere else... surely, this man is a true ladies man.

Yet how much of that is reality, and how much simply commercial fantasy?

Are nightclubs simply used as a convenient proxy by the media for “mate value”?

And, should you spend your time in them... or are they a waste of time?