(3) Journeyman

When you talk to girls, it must be pleasant. You need to make them smile. That doesn’t mean be a joker, but it DOES mean be someone it’s enjoyable to talk with.

When you go out to meet women, one thing you always ought to be doing is making women smile.

I don't mean being a clown or a comedian. I don't mean you have to load them up with hammy compliments or get them retelling all their happiest memories.

I just mean that women should be smiling as they're talking to you, because they like talking to you, because talking to you is a pleasure.

John Wayne was an icon of American cinema. In this piece, we break down his charisma, and show what his behavior and the behavior of others around him says about his characters.

We're gearing up to rerelease my course on charisma, Charisma in a Bottle.

In advance of the rerelease, I thought I'd do some 'charisma breakdowns' on a variety of leading men and other figures where we look at clips of the man and discuss what he does that makes him so charismatic.

Our focus will be on nonverbal (fundamentals-based) charismatic signals he puts out, social signals, and some of the charismatic subtext in his verbal communication.

To kick off the series, I'd like to start with John Wayne.

What end must you aim for in a seduction? Is it attraction? Is it stimulation? Is it to impress her so much she chases? In fact, it’s none of these… not if you want the girl, that is.

Hey guys.

I hope you are all doing well.

Let’s get ready for some advanced stuff.

Today, I would like to reflect on how the typical “ends” in pickup and seduction are not what one should strive for (aside from shagging her, of course).

By ends, I am referring to what you want to accomplish, so you get her into bed:

• Do you impress her?

• Do you stimulate her?

• Do you make her attracted? (I prefer the word “compliance”)

Are these ends the correct ones? That’s what we will discuss. I will cover the typical concepts of ends and why they are not real ends or simply just a means to an end.

Then I will cover what the real ends are.

This post should not be confused with “the end game” of seduction and whether your end goal with a woman is a relationship or casual sex. Only you can provide the answer to that question.

So we will discuss which ends to focus on to have the most results. This is a more objective approach than trying to answer the subjective question of what type of relationships you’d like to have with women.

I will start with basic concepts and get into complex stuff later. Let’s dive in.

People are becoming pricklier, and women are no exception. To succeed with them, you must at times disarm them first. There are 4 different ways to do that.

Lately I've been dealing with disarming.

The concept sprung to mind most recently as I realized more and more of our readers are men stuck in the 'standards zone' -- a place where they cannot get the women they want because they don't meet those women's standards. Rather than disarm their concerns (because I wasn't really treating them as part of our target audience before), I argued with guys that women's standards are not actually high... which of course just makes guys who are of this mind close up and dig into where they already are.

Now, arguing with people obviously is not an effective way to open up communication lines with them.

Arguing is what you do when you want to bludgeon someone, either to make an example of him, or to win him over by sheer force of argument... which usually won't carry much farther than a single interaction, and tends to burn through good will.

The thing is, people across the board are becoming more argumentative -- and that goes for women.

People are more opinionated right now then I've seen them since I've been alive. I wasn't around during the anti-war protests in the 1970s, so maybe it was worse then, but at least in the years since the 1980s this is the most prickly I've seen it.

Women in particular are being dosed with all this propaganda about a 'battle of the sexes' going on.

Not all women are equally susceptible to this programming. Some are very, some are a little, some aren't really at all.

However, you will encounter women who are.

To succeed with these women (or, as a less ambitious goal, to avoid unpleasant encounters!), you must be able to disarm their prickly defenses.

You must, in other words, be able to take them off their guards.

Society doesn’t care about men. Women are worshipped. For this reason, men can’t get women. Is this true? Or is it… fantasy?

We had a guy register on our forum and derail a thread to talk about how if you're "not in the top 1% of men" women don't want you and you can't get girls.

Needless to say, this is a guy who admittedly does not get girls. So he must know all about what it takes to get girls, eh?

Am I in the top 1% of attractive men? I suppose it depends how you determine that. I tend to think I am, so long as you're taking into account charm, social abilities, resolve, and whatnot. But I can tell you I definitely was not when I started out on this journey... and I still got girls. Some of them quite hot, too.

I shagged a fashion model when I had a beer belly, baggy clothes, mumbled talk, and a little boy haircut! I got a beautiful, vivacious girlfriend who was the niece of the former Secretary of Defense of a Latin American country around the same time! (she didn't want to date me at first, but persistence paid off!)

Our Field Reports Board on the forum is filled with lays from guys who aren't yet in the "top 1% of men" (as well as some guys who probably are!).

But this isn't about "do you need to be top 1% to get girls" (I've already addressed that elsewhere).

This is about this particular excerpt from one of this user's posts in his forum thread:

But it is true though.  Women are propped up and worshipped by society.  Men are disposable and basically thrown away like defective toys.  The only ones with any real power, control or lasting effect over women these days are the 1 percent.

There it is, isn't it?

"Women are worshipped. Men are disposable. Only the top 1% of men can rise above it."

Let's talk about that mentality, and how guys get it... and also why it's a sack of over-ripe mainstream media brain-slave cow manure.

Toxic behaviors (even the little ones) can make relationships aggravating. Yet there are ways to tackle them… and disincentivize a relationship partner from using them.

Unless you've chosen a highly enlightened mate, you'll probably deal with some bad behavior sometimes in relationships. If you've chosen someone who's a little more 'special', you may have more of these to deal with than others do... but almost everyone has to deal with toxic behavior at least occasionally.

Most strategies you'll see for dealing with toxic behaviors are based around withdrawing, closing yourself off, giving the other person space, and so on. This can be an effective approach. It's especially useful for people you decide you just want to wash your hands of.

However, "withdrawing into your shell" isn't so useful a strategy for an ongoing relationship... things like the 'Gray Rock' strategy are really for people you want to out of your life, not those you're entangled with by choice.

So let me give you a couple of more assertive strategies you can use to nix toxic behavior in your relationships.

Why do women scream during sex? One theory claims it’s to draw other males near for sperm competition. But does this actually happen in real life?

I had a conversation the other day with a friend about women screaming during orgasm.

He told me about a hypothesis he'd encountered in the (idealistically egalitarian-utopian, not to mention panned by scholars) book Sex at Dawn that women yell during orgasm to attract competing mates for sperm competition.

Right on the face of it, this hypothesis has always seemed obviously incorrect to me.

First off, not to brag or anything (although I guess it's going to sound that way... can't be helped though, eh?), I've made a lot of girls scream quite loud from sex, yet I've never had a guy knock at my door and ask if he could have her next.

Second off, I've heard plenty of women I wasn't having sex with screaming, yet never has the urge come over me to knock on the couple's door and tell the man to beat it because it was my round with her now.

Third, I have never heard a single story in all my life and all the very many sex stories I have heard from the tons of men I've known in the seduction space of even a single man being chased off by another man following the first man's woman engaging in orgasm vocalizations.

Not even among hunter-gatherers, who are the cheerily idealized subject of the Sex at Dawn book, have I come across any evidence of moaning women attracting competitor males who chase off the guy making the woman moan and take her for themselves.

The "female sex vocalizations attract competitor males for sperm competition" hypothesis seems to describe a behavior that is completely absent from humans from anything I have ever actually seen or heard both firsthand and from others from anywhere else in the world.

Yet, when I dug into the research on women's sex vocalizations a bit more, I discovered some interesting tidbits that do tie in, a bit, to the Sex at Dawn theory -- although, I think, not quite in the way the authors framed it (at least, not based on the synopses I've read, not having read the book).