How I use conversations about her “peak experiences” in dates, and in pitching non-monogamy

Women want you to “get” them, to lead them effectively, and not to be boring: remember that boredom = death when it comes to dating. What’s that look like? It means not being too boring and conventional, but it also means avoiding being too weird and out there.

On dates, I often ask girls about their peak experiences, and a reader I’ve emailed with has mentioned that he “needs to remember your peak experiences line for my next date.” It’s a favorite, and I’ve used many variants on it, and it’s also great because the girls will usually offer a socially acceptable answer at first, like, “When I graduated from college.” whatever. Then I can talk about how most people won’t admit their true answers, and say something like, “You know when it’s Sunday and someone asks what you did this weekend and you were like, ‘I was hanging out,’ because you can’t say, ‘I spent all weekend in bed with this awesome guy.'” A comment like that does a bunch of work… if you think you understand, explain what work you think it does in the comments.

“He was nice but average, unstimulating”

“A few weeks ago, I was staring a strange man in the eyes during an energetic coaching session. I’d met him just a few hours before; like nearly all men I’ve known for a few hours, he was nice but average, unstimulating; I’d introduced myself with a polite handshake and didn’t think much of it.” From this essay. For men, as you’ve read here at Red Quest before, “Boredom = death.” Most men are boring to most women most of the time. Are you ready to be different than most guys?

Probably not.

The essay has other interesting, unusual material, like, “When I was 20, I went on a semi-harrowing OKCupid date and woke up the next morning in my date’s bed. I asked him how did you get me to sleep with you? He shrugged and handed me a book on pickup artistry, and I sat down on his couch and read it. Then I went and read more; I joined pickup artistry forums….” Almost no women ever ask such questions (most women are boring and predictable, but, if they’re young and/or hot, that’s enough… men and women are different). Fewer will accept the answers. Most women hate the idea of men consciously learning and deliberately practicing game, which is a shame, because it leads to better outcomes for them, as women do like being competently seduced. But no one said life, or women, have to make sense, or be consistent. The knowledge about how to be non-average and stimulating is out there, for the guys who want to learn and use it, but most guys prefer being peasants, not wizards.

The post about there not being much left for me to say, while encouraging other guys to carry on

I’ve said as much before, so maybe this one won’t stick either, but I think I’m basically done writing Red Quest. After more than five years of writing, few, if any, of my original goals for Red Quest have been accomplished: I thought, to cite one example, that writing about sex clubs and non-monogamy would make a bunch of guys try some of the strategies I suggest, then report back on what they found, but, instead, I’ve moved closer to the view that most guys interested in or peripherally orbiting this space don’t get laid at all, or minimally (a view elaborated in most guys don’t care much about getting laid, I hypothesize). Most guys feel they are doing good enough and thus don’t try to do better, or they are so mired in their existing problems that they think the path to improvement too long and arduous to start.

You’re probably more normal, in many ways, than you think: rules and breaking rules

Maybe you’ve heard about the book: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, by Richard Reeves. There’s an interview with Reeves here, and he’s been on a bunch of podcasts too. OF BOYS AND MEN shows that boys and men underperform women in education and, eventually, work. Rates of male suicide are rising; more and more men are doing video games instead of work, socializing, hitting on women, or raising families; rates of obesity and sexlessness are rising; and yet these ideas are getting little play in the legacy media, which is wedded to a narrative of women as helpless, hapless victims of men. In the media, the social power of women is too often wrapped up in victimhood. Although the data have changed, the media narrative hasn’t. What’s going on?

In THE MATRIX, there is a famous scene in which Morpheus tells Neo that some rules can be bent, and others broken. It’s a good scene! We all want to imagine ourselves being the rule breakers, not the dutiful rule followers (who are inevitably presented as boring, droning cucks in legacy media products), but I’m not so sure that this ideology of “breaking good, following bad” is universally good and adaptive. We live in a world with lots of temptations and lots of justifications for seizing those temptations. Temptations are everywhere: high-sugar foods, driving instead of biking, messing around on the Internet instead of learning, arguing with strangers instead of meeting your neighbors, hyper-addictive opioids… the list could go on. I’ve been rolling an idea around in the mind: “What is good for the average or median may not be ideal for the extremes.” This applies to things like education through the school system and, for very smart people, following direction. Some drugs enhance the lives of highly capable of people, while other drugs ruin the lives of those who become addicts. Are “drugs” good, or are they bad? Both, and neither. A key skill in life is figuring out which rules can be bent or broken, and which should be followed. For most people, in most situations, following the rules is probably wise.

Anything you read about dating in the legacy media is about weirdo outliers

Normal, reasonable people don’t have the weird, bizarre sex and dating problems that legacy media outlets are continually writing about: the point comes up because of a foolish advice column from a woman to a woman, titled “Why Isn’t Anyone Sliding Into My DMs?!” I’m not going to do a link because however dumb you think the material might be from the title, it’s dumber. I used to write analyses of this class of dumb article but then I was like… “Why?” Why bother? It’s pure entertainment, with no more bearing on reality than novels about dragons and swords.

The media is almost entirely made by people who are abnormally self-aggrandizing, self-regarding, grandiose, entitled, and/or narcissistic people… and those people are trying to make money in a shrinking, shrieking, deranged industry. Almost all of the dumbest stuff comes from NYC, too, I think because of the extreme gender skew there… college-educated women far outnumber men in the NYC metro area, creating an environment in which women have to compete much harder for men than they do elsewhere. The high cost of housing, because of legal constraints imposed by the city on building more housing also means that most people feel they can’t afford to have families, so they might as well f**k around a lot instead.[1] Women get pushed towards spinsterdom, because so few guys can afford the cost of an okay family housing unit. Normal girls in normal places, like Denver or Dallas or wherever, who want boyfriends, get them, and don’t have the constant struggle some NYC chicks do.

Mr. Blackwing’s first sex party

Mr. Blackwing’s first sex party, a story and field report. Mr. Blackwing is successfully applying ideas from the book and living a more vibrant life as a result. Are you?

“Tone” and “teasing” are hard to nail

I was reading some of Juggler’s book, which, like BradP’s, is very good, but as I was reading it I kept thinking about how hard things like tone and teasing are to nail. So many little things comprise “tone”… micro-expressions, micro-aspects of body language, subtle parts of the voice’s timbre… all these things matter, and should be put together effectively, for a guy to succeed. The number of romantically ineffective guys out there shows that this isn’t happening, despite the knowledge of how to make it happen being widely available. Juggler says, “I used to smile wrong. I would spot an attractive woman, make eye contact with her and then smile full-tilt. My expression jumped from dour to grinning in a split second. This came across as forced and awkward and kept me celibate for years.” I doubt it was only the smile that kept Juggler “celibate for years,” but I’m sure it contributed… people, particularly women, are highly attuned to interpersonal vibe, and highly attuned to people whose vibes are “off” somehow, as many guys’s are… we get many years of schooling in math, reading, etc., and almost no formal schooling in how to interact with other people.

How to turn a woman off: be weak and indecisive

Women hate weak men: I’m leading with that generalization because a friend’s girl went out with a guy who kept asking her if this was okay, if that was okay, if what he said was okay, etc. With seemingly everything he said and did, he needed direct, explicit feedback from her indicating that what he was acceptable. Women, though, want guys who know how to lead and who can read a woman and understand where she’s at regarding him, and there’s also something to be said for being a guy who does what he wants and doesn’t appear to care what other people think, in a socially calibrated way. Paying attention to the woman’s tone, affect, and body language isn’t that hard to do.

The girl said her date’s behavior was a huge turn-off to her. He’d become the pathetic male feminist, who listens to what the NYT writes and what NPR says, and thus understands nothing about what or who actual women want. He didn’t f**k that night, and he should read Red Quest instead of the hyperwoke NYT. Don’t pay attention to what people say, pay attention to what they do. Regarding women, pay attention especially to who they do: it’s not the woke male feminists.

But, there is some danger in reading the paragraph above, because the exact opposite of the “is this okay?” guy isn’t right, either. It’s not like that guy, or any guy, should ignore everything about a woman’s preferences. Being boorish is wrong, most of the time, with most women. There’s an in-between state that is optimal: women love it when guys can “read” them and get them. If she’s on a date with you, chances are she’s more into you than not. Getting to this state of being bold and decisive without being overbearing is key, and in some ways this post elaborates on The top player (seducer) is an extreme insider or an extreme outsider, but not average.

How Richard Hanania used The Game and evolutionary biology to overcome anxiety

It’s a story consistent with things you’ve read here on Red Quest, although few people probably want to “constantly troll people, and get them to hate you with a passion.” Instead of trolling people and getting them to hate you, it might be better to try and be right, and to grow, but the most interesting parts concern Hanania’s introduction to THE GAME, which goes beyond the game…

While in college, I read The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The author was Neil Strauss, a journalist who as a New York Times columnist had achieved some level of professional success but had bad luck in his dating life. He started out by doing research on the “seduction community,” a group of men that in the early days of the internet got together to figure out how to meet and attract women

THE GAME is still the introduction many of us have to the game. Evolutionary biology underlies the game…

The most powerful “privilege” is hot girl privilege, which is everywhere

A hot girl, “Heather,” moves in nearby: I chat with her because she’s hot (obviously), and I believe in fire & maneuver, or the practice of continually being in the game… a theme consistent with A lot of guys are pussies, but that means opportunity for the few who aren’t. People who succeed usually succeed because they are consistently doing things right, every day, and building towards their goals.

Heather seems receptive. I run into her a few times, and find out that she’s broken up with her boyfriend and moved out of his place, which is off in a boring suburb. She doesn’t know anyone… somewhere in the beginning she mentions that she finds guys easier to get along with. Mentally, I infer that, like a lot of hot girls, her real social skills are poor, and, because she is hot, she finds it easy to attract guys who want to f**k her, but who are too pussy to make a move, into her outer orbit, where those guys offer her attention but don’t have a real shot at f**king her.