If you’re looking to figure how to get your willy wet, the seduction community is still your best bet. Still, that doesn’t mean that some of the ideas they espouse aren’t fucking retarded, the result of slipshod thinking or naked solipsism. One of the biggest idiocies running around seduction community websites, and to a lesser extent, Roissysphere blogs, is the effectiveness of cold approaches. Pretty much all mainstream PUAs rely on cold approaches to get laid, and cold approaching forms the basis of almost every major game method in existence. And I won’t deny that cold approaching not only works, but is absolutely necessary if you want to get laid with any regularity. But most PUAs don’t understand the social context in which cold approaching works, which is why if you live in an environment outside of that social context, it can not only backfire on you, but cockblock you in every venue in your hometown for good.
The concept of cold approaching – coming up to women you or your friends don’t know in public places and trying to bed them – is based on exploiting a quirk of human psychology brought on by the configuration of modern society. (There are reasons to doubt this evo-psych explanation, but lets stick with it for now for the sake of simplicity.)Â I’ve read concise explanations of it from The Mystery Method to Roosh’s Bang, but since I don’t feel like re-typing a block of text to quote a dead tree book right now, I’ll go with Roissy’s explanation:
In the gigantic atomized urban tribe of any big city playing the numbers is not the high risk strategy it once was for our distant male ancestors who were often locked out of any future matings when a pickup attempt went awry and the target or cockblock would run and tell the whole tribe what a loser he is. Today, the proximity of exes has very little impact on potential future conquests. For men, this has bought them virtually unlimited opportunity to get laid. For women, this has robbed them of one of their most potent weapons in ensuring that only the fittest males get access to their vaginas — the withering ostracization of their sexual rejection.
Basically, cold approaching is made possible by the urban meat-grinder throwing a monkey wrench in the human proclivity for tribal organization. In a city of millions, getting blown out by the hipster chick with too much mascara in the bar on 69th street won’t result in your social proof being trashed until the day you die. As such, most game manuals urge you to approach as much as possible and to spend as much time approaching as you can. This is where you get Mystery telling you to “go out gaming four hours a night for four nights a week.”
But what if you don’t live in a city of millions? What if you live in a city of mere hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, or just thousands? Then mass cold approaching is the furry hatted, pierced soul patch-sporting kiss of death. Why? Mass approaching works best in cities that fulfill at least one of two criteria:
- The city must have a sizable population. At the bare minimum, a million souls, give or take a hundred thousand. Basically, any metropolis that’s large enough that you don’t have to worry about running into the same people on a regular basis, much less everyone in the city knowing each other. Examples: New York City, Los Angeles, London.
- The city’s population must be transient, comprised of people who don’t stay there for very long. Examples: Las Vegas, Ocean City, Miami.
It’s a truism that repeatedly approaching girls in the same venue in the same time frame will ding your social proof each time you get blown out. Failing to close four times in a row will not endear you to the fifth girl you hit on in the span of an hour. Well, small cities and towns function like slightly larger approach venues in that everyone is, if not familiar with each other, at least runs into each other on a semi-regular basis while going about their lives. Because there are fewer people and those people are culled from less diverse backgrounds, social circles are fewer and overlap more, thus enabling gossip, rumors, and news to spread quickly throughout the populace. Unless you yourself don’t stay in one place for too long, cold approaching like the The Mystery Method tells you to in these places is basically pissing in your own sandbox.
An excellent example of an environment where mass approaching will destroy your reputation is college. While less tribal than high school (where only the sexiest, savviest men get laid with any regularity), college is still more closely knit then your average city. Undergrads live together in dormitories for four years, go to classes together, and cross each others’ paths in the hallways, dining halls, and student unions. Social life revolves around get-togethers like parties and sporting events where most everyone is familiar with each other. Cold approaching like you’re in a bar or club is the fastest way to get branded a weirdo. In order to get action in college, you need to make friends and network with people, which requires a bare minimum of social intelligence. Because many seduction gurus were either virgins or near-virgins in college and honed their craft in large cities like L.A. or New York, they don’t understand this at all.
I know of what I speak, because I’ve spent the majority of my life living in small to medium-sized cities. The biggest city I’ve lived in for any length of time is Montreal (pop. 1,620,693) – coincidentally the place where I had the most success mass approaching. (There are a host of other factors that make Montreal a paradise for players and PUAs, but that’s for another time.) As of right now, I live in Albany, New York, pop. 95,658. The greater metro area does have a larger population of over a million, but the area is highly suburbanized and save for rolling into town for the 9-to-5 five days a week, most suburbanites have little to no interaction with the city they work in. While not a place where everyone knows each other, Albany’s size means you’ll be rubbing elbows with many of the same people more often than you’d like to. I can’t play the numbers game here without burning up my social proof like Jerry Jennings in a tanning booth. If you try it, you may pull a few numbers, maybe even a couple lays, but I guarantee that inside of two weeks, you’ll be known around town as the loser perv who’s always bothering women at the bars. Even my hometown of Syracuse (pop. 140,658) is problematic because I’m always running into people I knew from years ago when I’m out on the town. Even if I was an bona fide pick-up artist who actually concentrated on accumulating notches, I couldn’t rely solely on cold approaching in the places I dwell.
So what’s the solution if you’re interested in racking up lays in a non-megalopolis? You’ve got to branch out and learn to network and inject yourself into social circles. You need to know how to make friends and how to be someone worth being around. You can’t be a fruity, peacocking dork and expect to be taken seriously, unless you’re content with banging the fucked-in-the-head dregs that don’t mind your pariah status. To my knowledge, Assanova is the only seduction guru that talks about any of this. Everyone else is at best teaching you half-truths, and at worst completely screwing your game up. A smart man adopts his tactics to his environment, and a one-size-fits-all approach to game is a ticket to eventual failure.
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The flip side is that in smaller cities and communities, such as at university, you’re probably less likely to get rejected outright. In a city like London, you’re so anonymous that you’re more likely to get turned down on the basis of stranger danger, whereas at university I have a very high approach/number ratio from direct daygame simply because there’s a built-in level of comfort from knowing that I come from the same sort of social milieu. I reckon it levels out overall because you have to make less approaches to get numbers, although if you’re starting out and are a nervous wreck on the approach it’s clearly best to avoid smaller communities.
Agree about the smaller city problem, which is why I avoid them. It is also the reason I avoid suburban areas or places with less than a million people. My greatest ‘unpaid’ success was in a transient dorm-like environment (20-22).
However social circles do have a strong racial component to them, which works against people like me.
Before using pro-escorts, I used to go after young (18-22) economically unstable gals in retail (small stores only) who were new to the city, or almost homeless gals who required a little ‘help. In both those situations hitting on gals after some comfort is built up, ironically, helps you get more gals through word of mouth- even if your primary target declines.
But this is a cat-and-mouse game, requiring a very cold/inhumane way of thinking. It was easier for me to do it because I was very frequently rejected based on race, so seeing them as objects rather than people became the default setting.
It is my belief that the combination of racial pre-selection by women, non-overlapping social circles and changing demography of the working age population of western countries is not going to work well. Something has to give..
Cold-approaching only works at the start and the end of the year in college because everyone lets their guards down to meet new people and/or get hammered.
I got 3 lays in my first month of uni, including one on my second night. Now I’m on a 6 month dry spell. The girls I should have actually blitzed saw my actions, took photo evidence in some cases, and now don’t open up to me (they are still attracted, but they know I’m a player). FML.
Still, new academic year coming up – it’s going to be great!
Hughman,
Try hitting on economically deprived, but OK looking, gals who are not in the university- after building some comfort. It sounds cynical, but who cares?
AD, easier said than done. I’m not even 20 yet, I’d just look like a prick.
Plus I’m fussy with my women – no cheaters (well, I’ll still fuck them but they can forget a relationship), at least a 7 and some sophistication/cultural appreciation, which requires a degree of education and intelligence in most cases (my aptitude tests put me in the top 0.5%, and I love learning, culture, fashion, food and drink – I find it impossible to relate to the 75% of proles with an IQ of 115 or below)
I can hold out for a while longer. I’m back home in very large metropolitan UK city, plenty of chances to blitz out some Game, then a holiday to Italy and Greece, then the new year will bring fresh meat to me. As one of the year groups socialites, it’ll be piss for me to find and pick up a fresh girl (plus I’m that bit older, more hench, more experienced, and I should have a tan and some fly custom clothes from my tour of the Med this summer)
Despair.
Depends on careers. Something that only requieres X amount of time is not that difficult. But the math-heavy careers requieres X amount of time and effort, doing that while at the same time putting an alpha frame and of course, trying to get the ego of the kind of not-so-hot chick that thrives with her 5-7 he bitch entourage to a reasonable level is simply a high stress experience that let’s you scarred.
All that while the cab drivers and the guys who are still on 1st semester subjects get laid WAY more.
Part of me is simply way too stubborn to let whatever I get laid or not be the only decision maker in my life, but that part is losing.
Or maybe is simply social retardation. High-school hell standing and all.
So, despair.
Ah yeah, also in a dry spell since my last girlfriend got out of the career (and the state). In October.
Hughman,
I made the same mistake as you, at the same age. Anything other than sexual chemistry is inconsequential. LTRs are overrated, don’t try too hard for them.
Think about it- you could have a stupid but adoring and cute girl, give you excellent BJs and ride you silly. Or you can have a ‘proper’ GF blow you with the enthusiasm of a microwaved dinner. The worst part is that your proper ‘GF’ will never adore you and spoil you.
About a year ago- I bumped into a girl who lived near me. Half black, very cute, but short and wide- I initially thought of just ignoring her, but she hit on me “I am not following you, you know” with a very sexy, cute smile. To make a long story short, we had a decent amount of very enthusiastic ‘unpaid’ fun for a few months. She was a 4-5, but the sex was good + she was an amazing cuddler.
A mediocre girl who adores you + is willing to do what you want with enthusiasm is worth more than a snotty bitch who won’t swallow or complains about the taste of your spunk.
This was an excellent blog post making an often unmentioned point. It is one I can relate to.
I have NEVER lived in a major city, though I have spent the majority of my life in a major metropolitan area (Chicagoland). For six years, I lived in a small town (population 8,000) in rural Northern Wisconsin.
One point unaddressed is that if your community is small enough, simply having sex with multiple women in a short time frame is dangerous for your social standing, especially as smaller communities are more likely to be conservative (in attitude if not in deed). Your best bet really is to find a sweet girlfriend. Standard Game advice of keeping a stable does not apply, because you will be found out. This will not only jeopardize your social proof, but your social standing in the community at larger. Keep your behavior up and you can be run out of town on a rail.
You can still apply principles of Game to making yourself more attractive and better managing your relations with women, but you cannot play the numbers game or rack up your count.
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Advocatus Diaboli,
You said, “It is my belief that the combination of racial pre-selection by women, non-overlapping social circles and changing demography of the working age population of western countries is not going to work well. Something has to give.”
Your statement almost makes it seem as if only non-white men are increasing as a share of the working population, leaving a large pool of disaffected non-whites to chase discriminating white women. That simply isn’t true, y’all have your own women to chase. Did that not occur to you?
At any rate the kind of informal racial segregation by housing will simply intensify. Sooner or later the cognitive dissonance which on the one hand allows SWPLs and neoconservatives (the goyish ones) to preach anti-racism but on the other hand to attend private schools and live in tony communities will perhaps collapse.
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Hughman,
There is a word for being unable to relate to “proles”, a term you’ve generously expanded to include 70% of the white population by cognitive ability. It’s called snobbery. That may not be your conscious intention, but if you’re legitimately unable to relate to persons who are not more than one SD above median intelligence then that suggests that perhaps you ought to work on your social intelligence, which blessedly is far more coachable than general intelligence.
I think the 1 million rule is a little overblown.
Just how many cities in the US have one million or more people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population
Oh, look, ten, if you grant San Jose CA a pass because it’s at 995 thousand.
I live in Baltimore, MD. Number 20 in the US in terms of population. 300 million plus people in the US by the way, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of incorporated areas called “cities”. Mine is number 20 – But Baltimore is too small for cold approaches? And over half a million people is small? Folksy?
Your larger point is well taken -the smaller the city or environment you are in or the more interconnected socially the fewer cold approaches you should do. Fine, and I want to congratulate you on helping many men out with this insight. But I think your idea of city size is a bit whack. 99 percent of what we call cities (and in most of the US there is a difference in size and governmental structure between cities and towns so don’t get them confused) are less than 100 thousand, and over 99.999 percent are under 500 thousand in terms of size, so I’m going to continue to do cold approaches in Baltimore without too much worry, thank you very much. After all, the population in this city is transient even if it doesn’t quite match your population criteria.
Thorfinnsson,
You still don’t get it. If non-white men always end up with non-white women, they will stop playing nice with the declining white population.
I can honestly say that my dislike for certain white subgroups is less than others because of sex. You see, once you have repeated ‘unpaid’ sex with someone of another group, you start seeing them as human- just like you.
Advocatus Diabli -
Non-white men are not some monolithic group, they are themselves fractured into a dozen or more sub-groups, so its not like non-white men, as a category, will have it in for white men, the other category. Chinese girls screen against Indian guys just as much, and Indian girls screen against Chinese guys just as much.
It’s more like all the many groups will be separate, the Chinese, the Indians, the Whites, etc, and all will dislike each other equally. So it’s hard to see how this is any worse for whites than any other group. All groups will have to cooperate or not cooperate.
So this lovely little fantasy of yours, where “non-whites” who will become the majority will all collaborate and be mean to “whites” because white girls don’t have sex with Indian men, is nothing more than a resentment fueled revenge fantasy.
Get over it already. We get you’re Indian and white chics don’t think your the hottest shit to exist on this planet, and we get that you resent white people for this, but don’t let this mislead you into saying silly things.
Advocatus Diaboli,
I am not sure what seeing someone as “human” is supposed to mean. It seems to be a very common tactic employed by liberals, globalists, miscegeners, and other one-worlder types. I often see it employed in connection with the supposed need to “break down barriers”.
I see non-whites as human. I do not see them, with certain exceptions, as part of any social group that I belong to. As such I don’t feel any particular obligations towards them. But according to others, the fact that they are human implies special obligations. Why?
Snakes are vertebrates. It’s high time we tear down the barriers between snakes and ourselves and start treating them as vertebrates. Too many times snakes have been insulted by subtly implying that they are sub-vertebrates since we blamed them for our eating from the Tree of Knowledge.
Oh, and so this doesn’t get too far off course, Clarence has an excellent point. One million is setting the bar a bit high. I very briefly lived in Austin, Texas which at the time had roughly 700,000 people. I realize that’s somewhat close to a million, but at no time did I feel that I was running into the same people all the time.
Consider further that the raw population of a city might not have much meaning to you. The City of Detroit has over 900,000 people, but most of them are blacks and Arabs. You do not want to be a lone white man among large numbers of either group, which leaves your area in Detroit being a few blocks around the Renaissance Center.
Detroit is an extreme example, but most major cities in North America have large zones that you either can’t go to or don’t want to go to. You’re basically looking for districts that have a lot a young people and not many NAMs.
Advocatus Diaboli: LTRs are overrated, escorts are more efficient.
Why stop there? Escorts are overrated, fapping is more efficient.
Thorfinnsson – I agree, unfortunately. I am a huge elitist. My school didn’t help (grammar school, selection for high performing individuals, and all male) But seriously, I can’t spend time in the company of many people unless I’m the one making a forced effort. I hate talking about sports, I watch little TV, and I just laugh at the sheeple’s understanding of science and politics. Luckily my course (medicine) is selective, and I got lucky with my dorm, it’s got enough geeks to keep me happy.
AD – I know, I’d rather have a loving feminine HB6 than a bitchy HB8 any day of the week. But I get my validation through women. I’m doing my best to kill that part of me off, but it’s hard. I just don’t want a string of one-night stands and 2 week STRs for the rest of my life.
Also, as a general note, I’d say 250,000 for a college/uni city, 500,000 for a normal one to run night game. In the UK that makes most cities acceptable.
Hughman,
I understand, particularly given your background. The UK is significantly more classist than the United States, where race is a more important fault line (see Advocatus Diaboli). Furthermore, the lower-class whites in the UK seem far more debased than even our fatasses. Either way, to take a page from Advocatus Diaboli, people are people and there is usually some basis to relate with them, even if it’s not what you’d rather be doing. I have my own upper class social circles, but I have no problem chatting up a waitress for sex or an auto mechanic.
Oh, and I think you’ll find that a pathetic misunderstanding of science and politics cuts across class. According to US GSS data, high school dropouts are the most likely group by educational attainment to believe that race and intelligence are linked. In other words, the least educated group is the best informed. A lot of higher education simply consists of learning and internalizing the dominant structure of taboos as an indicator of social status. This is especially true in our totalitarian liberal era but to a certain extent is simply the way societies work–witness what happened to nontrinitarian theologians when faith was taken seriously.
1. You’d be shocked at how little people remember your approaches.
2. I think the million number is a little high. I think once you climb over the 200, 000 mark you should be fine.
3. Not giving away your intentions right of the bat is what god invented indirect game for.
4. I don’t think cold approaching is itself the problem, it’s player vibe. In smaller cities, you need to keep things much more low key.
In a sense, this is a special case of severe personality incongruity. A person who just naturally does cold approaches, without ever reading it in a book, is not a small-town person. If such a person is born in a small town, they’ll scramble to get out as soon as they can. People adopt PUAisms incongruently and they come off incongruent… it’s something of a chicken-or-the-egg problem, but if you really completely internalize the stuff in Mystery’s books, then you’re not gonna stick around Bumfuck Alabama very long.
There are only a handful of real cities in Australia. Most places are just large towns and this post highlights the biggest problem with game anyone outside of Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne faces.
You should do a follow up post on how to game best in these towns. I am not sure I want to live in Sydney my entire life just so pick ups are easier.
You make a good point. I live in a relatively small city, ~150,000 people, and I do mainly social circle game. I guess I intuited that cold approaching wasn’t a good idea, but you’ve explained why.
I’ll be in Tel Aviv for a couple of weeks. We’ll see how cold approaching works here. The benefit is that I really do have an excuse for cold approaching girls here; I don’t know where anything is.
If a million people were truly required, than Roissy wouldn’t be able to do what he does as DC only has a population of about 600,000. While metro Washington is much larger, I somehow doubt he did much wandering into NoVa or Maryland. I’d say 400,000, depending on density, is sufficient.
Thorfinnsson – yes, the UK is split along class and that’s connected to our greater love of meritocracy.
I’ve been with enough dumb girls to know that I simply can’t respect them, hell, I’m not even going to get it up for them. I need to be mentally stimulated as much as I physically need to.
As for sheeple behaviour spread across class boundaries, in the UK, I’d disagree. The education system for the rich and the intelligent kids isn’t too shabby. Our private schools are the best and most selective on earth, as are our top universities. When I left my school, I was disappointed that I was going to lose my cross-subject mental stimulation, but that hasn’t happened. Quite the opposite. My block mates do a variety of subjects, and many of the medics are knowledgable in other subjects as well.
*above post is mine
@ Sparks123: Isn’t DC a city with a large transient population and a city of mostly single status whores? That would make it an exception to the rule.
I dunno why Advocatus Diaboli is so keen on staying in the West if his lack of success with white chicks causes him so much psychological distress. There’s no way I would bother keeping my cracker ass in Japan, China, or India if my ethnicity was a problem, even if I was raised as a native of one of those cultures. I’d head back to the genetic homeland, go native, and forget about my shitty background.
And you gotta have sex with foreigners to view them as “human”? I hope not, since I’ve been around poor Africans, favela dwellers, and even horrifically disfigured lepers and never had any problems with thinking of them as “nonhuman.” I’m sure glad I didn’t have to have sweaty, body-parts dropping off-sex with that noseless, legless guy I met down in Brazil to appreciate him as a sentient being…
Switch “nonhuman” to “human.” Typing too fast…
But I get my validation through women. I’m doing my best to kill that part of me off, but it’s hard.
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I’ve lived all my life with the opposite problem. I am attracted to so few men I don’t really care what the majority of them think of me. And then I find one I do like and get attracted or whatever and I really hate the feeling of vulnerability, the fact that I care what they think. I think this and my selectivity are my two real challenges in the mating game.
I was actually just about to write a post about this until I was browsing your site and found this post. Playing the numbers game is just stupid. If you have to approach more than three girls in one night before getting a solid date, then something is wrong and you need to go back to the drawing board and examine what you’re doing.
I think a lot of guys have the mentality of “approach x amount of women and one will want to sleep with me”. Just because you approach more women, it doesn’t mean that their standards are different. For example, you can go into as many fancy four star restaurants as you want, but you’re still not going to find a customer that is in the mood for a Big Mac. It’s a crappy analogy, but the point is that no matter how many girls a guy approaches if he is a loser, weird, or unattractive, he just isn’t going to find a girl that is going to be willing to sleep with him.
One thing that happened with a group of guys I know was really funny. These guys played the numbers game. It turns out that they all ended up sleeping with the same girls. these were girls that were willing to sleep with any guy and were just flat out ugly and nasty looking. Was it be cause of the numbers game? No, it was because all three of these guys found the girls that were willing to sleep with anybody. In other words, they didn’t get the girls because of game; they got the girls because they were nasty and willing to fuck any guy. If you have to play the numbers game, then all you’re really playing for are nasty girls that will fuck any guy and probably give you an STD.
Some what true. I’m a college student and I was afraid to cold approach thinking the same thing. But after doing it in moderation, I found out it isn’t that bad. As long as you don’t do the ballsy aggressive shit you can be fine.
In college you can play the numbers game, but you have to be more subtle about it. Instead of approaching from across the quad, position yourself in a place where you can casually strike up conversations with women, with situational openers. The feeling that she’s being picked up in that situation is a hundredth of the alternative case of you approaching from a distance away. Think of when you sit in line for an hour at the DMV, you naturally strike up a conversation with the person next to you. That’s the dynamic you want.
If the woman shows marked interest, set up plans to meet up. Otherwise forget about it. Forget the mentality of pushing the interaction to the max every time. Also, in any decent sized college, say 8,000 plus, there will be many different scenes, so total failure in one may have no effect on your standing in others.
And try not to fuck ugly girls in high places. They will be bitter and tell their friends, and the friends will think you’re a loser for bumping an ugly.
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