The Rawness

In the last installment, I discussed how I met a beautiful half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican girl at a nightclub back in 1997.  I pull a bold move and call her over while she’s dancing with another guy, and to my surprise it actually works.

She comes over, and I play it cool.  Long story short, we exchange numbers.

I call her later in the week and we arrange to meet.  I pick her up in Brooklyn, where she rents a room.  In her room she has a cheesy calendar of muscular half-naked, waxed black men of dubious heterosexuality.  Kind of like a bunch of Shemar Moores on steroids.  That already makes a terrible first impression.

The plan is to go back to my place and watch some movies and eat some snacks.  As we get in the car, she’s asking me a bunch of questions.  It’s like 20 questions, she has a ton of them, but none are particularly insightful.

“How tall are you?”  “How much do you weigh?” “Are you mixed with anything?” “Are you part Chinese?” “Are you sure?” “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” “Do you like big girls?” [Wait what?] “Are you really Haitian?”

This last question she keeps coming back to.  In the 80s and a good part of the 90s, many people had very little exposure to Haitians.  And the few Haitians they often did have exposure to were a very specific subset, the poor immigrants and refugees settled in the urban centers or the ones they saw on TV when they were showing clips of starving folk.  So I’d often meet people who claimed I didn’t look Haitian, even though there are tons of people in Haiti who look just like me.  They’d expect me to look like one of the refugees or impoverished people they saw on newsreels or like one of the taxi drivers they encountered in Brooklyn.  It’s similar to how people who’ve never met many Ethiopians expects them all to look like extras from the “We Are the World” music video, when in reality many of them are quite cosmopolitan, healthy and good-looking.  Nowadays with a lot more Haitians everywhere from all walks of life, this doesn’t happen to me anymore, but back then it would be an annoying recurring conversation.  But this girl takes it to a whole other level.

“So you’re half-white?”

“No, full Haitian.”

“Chinese grandparent?”

“No, full Haitian.”

“You sure?”

“What do you mean am I sure? I think I would know.”

“Is your dad Puerto Rican?”

“What part of full Haitian don’t you get?”

“No, I mean was he maybe Haitian nationality but racially Puerto Rican?”

“Listen….Mom? Haitian.  Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Haitian.”

“You seem really touchy about your race.  What’s up with that?”

“I’m not touchy about it.  You’re the one who keeps harping on it.  I’m touchy about answering the same question over and over again.”

“Okay, okay, fine.”

“So what movie did you bring to watch?”

” ‘Money Talks’ with Chris Tucker and Charlie Sheen.”

“Oh.  Really?”  That sounds like a really bad movie, I think to myself.  “Do you own anything else?”

“No, this is my favorite movie.  My favorite! It’s so funny.  Sooooooooo funny.  You’ll love it, I promise.  We have to see this one, pleeeeeeaaaasse?”

I think about it and realize that it might actually turn out to work in my favor if it’s a shitty movie.  If the movie is too good, we’ll both get engrossed in it, I’ll actually want to see it through to the end and I won’t focus on the primary mission at hand, which was sex (let’s keep it real here).  No, the more I think about it, a shitty movie is the best thing that could happen.  We’ll get distrated, stop paying attention, end up talking throughout it, making out, etc, etc.  This’ll be a great night.

We get to my apartment and enter my room.  I pop the tape into the VCR.  We sit on the bed to watch the movie.  We get about 5 minutes into the movie.

“HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHAA!!!  Oh my God, did you see that?!”  She hasn’t stopped laughing since the credits started rolling.

“Uh, yeah.  I did.”

“Why aren’t you laughing?”

“It was funny, but come on, it wasn’t that funny.”

“Are you for real?”

“Are you? Come on, let’s just get back to the movie.  Stop worrying about me laughing.”

Now I won’t lie, “Money Talks” is not a terrible movie.  It isn’t particularly great either.  It’s adequate, a little bit above sitcom level comedy. Nothing groundbreaking or memorable, not the kind of movie I’d watch a second time, but the kind of movie I could slightly enjoy if I was watching it with someone else.  Anyone else.

She won’t stop cracking up for the whole movie.  I mean cracking up to the point where she’s convulsing with laughter.  She’s not only riveted to every utterance in the movie, she laughs uproariously at the dumbest parts.  Some of the lines she cracks up at the hardest I’m pretty sure aren’t even jokes.  I’m too annoyed with her antics to enjoy the movie, especially as she keeps asking me nonstop “Isn’t this the funniest?”

I realize there is no sex to be had during the watching of this movie.  It’s just not going to happen.  She’s not coming up for air between uproarious belly laughs and interrogations about why I’m not laughing harder, and on top of that I’m losing my motivation to even make any moves on her.  “Haven’t you seen this already?” I ask, hoping she’ll take a hint.

“Oh…heh…HAHAHA…I’ve seen it so many times….HA!…I lost count!”

“And it still cracks you up this much?”  [I'm normally not this snippy on dates, but this whole ordeal wore down my patience pretty quickly]

“Oh ‘Money Talks’ never gets old!”

Apparently not. I resign myself to the fact that I am not going to make any sex happen while this movie is on.  No way, no how.  But the minute it ends, though, it’s on.

So the ordeal is over.  It’s late, I’m going to have to wait until the movie’s over to make this happen.  As the movie wraps up and she wipes the tears of laughter from her eyes, we make small talk.

Then it happens.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“What’s what?”

“That.“  She points.

“You mean….my computer?”

“Yeah!  Can I see it?”

“Um….okay.  You want to look at my computer….now?  As in right now?”

“Yeah, yeah, let me see it.  What do you use it for?”

“You’ve never used one?”

“No.  Not really, my uncle had one and I used one when I was a kid…”

“Oh okay, let me show you.”  I turn on the computer and log onto the Internet.

She gets serious.  “Uh…what are you doing?”

“I’m getting on the Internet.”

“What’s that!?!”

“It’s…it’s like this big network where you can talk to anyone anywhere in the world in real-time, and your only limitation is how fast you can type.”

Her eyes widen.  “Really?” She in sincere awe at the concept.  Even in 1997 the Internet was still a pretty well-known concept so it boggles my mind someone could be totally ignorant of it, but I figure if it’s that impressive to her maybe it could help my cause.  I decide to really impress her by showing her a chatroom.

“Look at this: you can even go into something called a chatroom where a bunch of people talk to each other at once, similar to the old party lines they used to have back in the day.”  I sit her in my desk chair and stand over her shoulder behind her as I log into one.

As the words and messages in the chatroom fill the screen she starts to get visibly nervous.  “What are you doing!!!!!!??!?!” she shrieks.

“What?  What?!”

“Can they see me?!“  She launches herself from the desk chair into my bed and hides behind a comforter while looking at the computer from a distance, anxiously.

I totally lose it at this point. “Are you fucking kidding me?!  You’re joking right?”

“Are you sure they can’t see me?”

To make things worse, my roommate Grip, who hears the commotion, comes upstairs and into my room, just in time to see her cowering in bed behind a comforter, staring nervously at the computer screen.

“What happened?” he asks.

She answers “He turned on that thing and opened up a room.”

He turns to me with a look on his face of part disgust, part disbelief, part amusement and part “I am never going to let you hear the end of this one, motherfucker.”  Out of embarrassment, I make a last ditch effort to show that my date really isn’t as dumb as  she seems (even though she totally is) and I say “She’s just playing.  Isn’t that right? Always joking.”  I take her and and gently attempt to lead her back to to the computer.

She lets out a scream like “AIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!  No!” and starts pulling back, like a tug of war, with me trying to pull her to the computer and her trying to pull away, with Grip just surveying it all, not knowing whether to laugh at me now or mercifully wait until later.

And it was at this moment I make an astounding personal breakthrough, one that every man must learn at some point but many never do: sometimes, no matter how hot she is, sometimes the chance of getting sex just isn’t worth it.  Grip leaves my room, thinking of the thousand and one ways he’ll give me grief over this for the coming year.  Meanwhile, I turn off the computer and the two of us settle in on the bed.  She’s got that come hither look, like it’s finally time to make that move.  And I say those magic words.

“Time to go.”  She had a look of disbelief.

She leaves me about 50 messages after that date, each one increasingly angrier and erratic as time keeps passing and I don’t call back.  Sometimes I still wonder where she is.  She was truly one of a kind.

First things first, click here to follow me on Twitter.  When I get enough people signed up I plan to do something fun and interactive with it.  But I won’t discuss it in any further detail until I have enough followers.

One night in 1997 I went out with the fellas to a hip-hop party being DJ-ed by old school legend DJ Red Alert at a spot called Downtime in Manhattan.  Nice spot, the music was great, the place was packed with just-dirty-enough chicks, my game was on fire, it had all the makings of a good night.

For anyone who doesn’t know much about New York, what you need to know is we’re renowned for our pizza, bagels, cheesecake and thirsty, thirsty thirsty ass dudes.  I mean Sahara thirst.  Just got out of jail, locked up in solitary most of the time with no lotion and a mouth too dry to even spit on your hand type of thirst.  As a result cockblocking is out of control here, especially in the dog-eat-dog world of hip-hop parties.  If you immerse yourself in enough of these spots, not only do you have to have your cockblock defenses up all the time, you have to refine your own cockblock game just to remain competitive.  Luckily I had just returned to NYC from living in Buffalo for a few years, one of the few places on the East Coast with thirstier guys than NYC, so I was well ahead of the local game in my defensive and offensive cockblocking skills.  It’s like doing combat in the Marines for a few years then coming back to your small town and joining the local police force.  Buffalo is like CB Special Forces for real.

I’m dancing with some girl and this guy keeps hovering around us.  He’s sticking to the periphery, hoping I don’t notice him.  If I was a rookie I probably wouldn’t have, but as a graduate of Buffalo nightclub game I’m endowed with 360-degree cockblock vision so dude was on my radar right away, but I didn’t pay it much mind at first.  The girl and I are dancing close, facing each other, and the pest keeps trying to stay out of my sight while catching her eye.  He’s winking, licking her lips, doing all this slick shit.  This annoys the hell out of me, especially after three songs or so.  She doesn’t smile back or do much to acknowledge him because she’s busy talking to me.  She’s basically ignoring him.

I finally ask, “Yo, who is that dude?  Do you know him?” 

She responds, “Oh, he’s a guy danced with for a song earlier who won’t leave me alone.  I’ve been blowing him off all night.”

Dag, that’s thirsty.  Worse, a bum like this isn’t just hurting himself, he’s contributing to blowing the girl’s ego out of control, which hurts everyone, most importantly me.  He then positions himself real close to us the side with his back to us like he’s not paying us any mind.  (Remember, he still thinks I’m not on to him)  I notice his hand behind his back facing outward, moving closer to hers.  Now I’m in a pickle: if I call him out over some girl I just met, I get into a dispute over a girl I don’t even care about and just boost her ego even more.  Women love when guys fight over them.  Even though the dispute would really be over his disrespect of me and would have nothing to do with her, that’s not how it would register in her brain.  But at the same time the longer I let him stand there doing slick shit, the worse I look.  The place is too crowded to just move elsewhere easily.  I refuse to leave the girl alone for him to swoop back in just out of principle at this point.  I didn’t care about hooking up with her at this point, I just wanted to make sure he didn’t (because I can be petty sometimes, sue me).  When you are willing to crash and burn in the process of ruining another guy’s chances, this is known as the Kamikaze Cockblock.

I let my hand brush against his.  He obviously thought it was hers and he took it (I have small hands for the record (not that that implies anything of course (no, really, it doesn’t))).  Then this bitch-ass actually starts writing letters in my hand.  This is the kind of desperation move thirsty guys do that just blows my mind, because not only is it horrendous but even if on the off chance it works, how can you respect yourself after?  Even if you win you’re a loser.  At life.  So I tell her, “This nigga’s seriously writing letters in my palm right now.  He thinks it’s you.  Watch this.”  And I start writing back, but looking straight ahead with a poker face.  She starts cracking up, which just makes him think she’s loving what he’d doing to “her.”  I see him start smiling too.  She and I are just cracking on the guy for about five minutes like our own personal in-joke.

When I think I’ve let the guy dig a big enough hole for himself, I squeeze his hand firmly.  He looks back, surprised.  I slowly wink at him with a totally creepy deadpan expression, still holding his hand.  The dude’s jaw drops and the girl bursts out laughing right there.  The guy just bolts. 

Fun fact: the average NY guy has become ten times as thirsty in the 10 years since this story took place. Especially in hip-hop clubs.  A desert nomad couldn’t top the stories of NYC thirst I’ve heard in recent years.  It really is no wonder a girl can be a strong 6 at best here and still walk around like she just finished booking the cover of Vogue and Maxim on the same day. 

Later on I’m at the bar, its near the end of the night and I’m pretty drunk.  On the dance floor is a couple dancing, and I notice the girl seems to be looking at me.  She’s really attractive, with a slightly exotic look I’d discover later was a Puerto-Rican/Irish mix.  I don’t pay it much mind, but each time I glance it that direction I can swear she’s looking at me.  Her expression is blank, not flirty.  She’s pretty far away, and the club is pretty crowded so she really could be looking at someone else or just staring in my general direction.  It’s so far away I can’t even be sure she can see me clearly.

I think, “What do I have to lose?  Let’s see what happens.”  I put on my best Blue Steel face, lean back against the bar, cock my head back, raise my hand to my hip and do that “come hither” thing with my fingers at her.  She just keeps staring in my direction blankly.  Did that even register?  Can she even see me from that far? I try it again, extra cocky this time.  Nothing.  She’s still dancing with the guy.

Oh well, it was worth a shot.  I turn to the bartender and order a beer.  Takes less than a minute.  I turn back around and inches from my face is the same girl.

Her, half-defiantly, “You called me over?”

Holy shit, that actually worked?!?!  I can’t believe it myself, but no way am I letting her know that.  Even though in the years following I will disavow cockblocking in general as a dating concept, at the moment I’m particularly proud of this one.  I play it off like this is my everday norm.

Me: “You know I did.”

Her: “Do I know you?”

Me: “You will.”

Little do I know I have just met the hands-down dumbest girl I will ever date.

Will be continued…

Lions

Years back, I was barhopping in the Lower East Side of NYC. The night was young, and my boy Grip and I were at the last stop of our crawl when we came across this African guy. I don’t remember how the conversation started because we were all well on our way to getting trashed, but at some point this African starts giving us his philosophy on men and women.

“Men are naturally noble creatures,” he said. “Society has made men like women. It’s made men afraid of their own shadows and afraid of what they really want. We were born to be hunters, it is our instinct, it is who we are! We have a natural desire to both be predators and to be regal.” This was the greatest pro-man pep talk we ever heard. And his deep African voice and accent just made it sound that much more regal and inspiring.

“You are a lion!” he announced, his voice rising majestically. “A hunter, a protector, a king! Do not settle! If you want something, go for it! Fight for it! You deserve the best, if you see a beautiful woman tonight, remember you are a lion and go over to her! Don’t be afraid, you are a hunter, a proud lion, this is your birthright!”

Grip and I started getting pumped. “Fuck yeah!!! We’re getting laid tonight! Lions!” We kept shouting about lions back and forth, ordering shots, hollering at every girl we could see, and at this point our confidence level was peaking.

After the African guy left us, we were still on an outrageous high. The guy was inspirational, like the Tony Robbins of the drunk singles scene. At that point Angelina Jolie could have walked in, and I would have stepped to her like she was just some chick from around the way and demanded some action. It was still only midnight, the crowd was bustling, there were hot girls aplenty, our confidence was soaring…it had all the makings of a classic night.

Fast forward to 3:30 AM. The herd has thinned and the prize specimens have all escaped or been captured by others. Not many choices remain. Grip and I were sloppy drunk, well beyond coherent at this point, and were just trying to prop ourselves up and barely succeeding. We gave up on chicks at this point. We look over at the other end of the bar and see our African friend from earlier talking to this short, stocky pasty-complexioned overweight white girl. No debate on this one, the girl is pretty awful looking. Kind of like a fire hydrant made of marshmallow that someone dressed up and put a wig on.

Out of respect (and shame and embarrassment) for him, we didn’t plan on saying anything to him or blowing up his spot, but as he glanced over at us our expressions must have given away what we were thinking, because he immediately walked over. He leaned in close and said slowly, in a low voice, “Sometimes the lion must eat grass.” Then he walked away.

I’m sure there was a life lesson in there somewhere, but I’m not sure what it was.

Dogs

Another bar, another long bygone year. Being young and naive, I was still at the age when my primary strategy for dealing with really hot women was earnestness. A friend of mind gave me the advice that the hotter as girl is, the more I should treat her like I would treat an ugly woman. And if she’s really hot, I should be borderline rude and arrogant. This seemed counterintuitive, and I was skeptical, but I told myself I’d give it a shot sometime.

So on this night it was my friend Beethoven (short for The Beethoven of Bitches^TM) and me drinking in a Brooklyn Bar. It was a decent crowd with some definite cuties.

Beethoven and I were sitting at the bar catching up. A hot hipster blonde and her friend nearby were getting hit on left and right by guys and playfully shooting them down. This was a giant ego boosting night for them; you could tell this was their normal Friday night routine: go out looking hot while teasing some eager, desperate guys they had no plans of hooking up with. There was a group of typical guys standing behind our chairs with their backs to us, and Hipster Blonde and her friend were on the other side of the guys getting their asses kissed making small talk. Hipster Blonde squeezed around the group of guys and interrupted Beethoven and me.

Hipster Blonde said to me “Do you mind if I put my jacket on the back of your chair?” My first instinct was to eagerly say “Sure!” and hit on her.  Then I remembered the advice.

I looked at her expressionlessly. “Let me think about it.” I turned away as if visibly annoyed and in deep thought. She stood there holding her jacket in her outstretched hand, speechless and with an expression of utter disbelief. I turn back at just the exact moment before the silence would have gotten uncomfortable and say playfully with a smirk, “Yeah, I guess you can.”

She playfully replied “Oh really? Are you sure it’s okay? I’d hate to inconvenience you.” I knew she was intrigued She probably couldn’t remember the last time I guy wasn’t eager to give her whatever she wanted. Or acted totally unimpressed by her.

We bantered and traded barbs for a bit, and then just when it was getting good I said “All right, well you should get back to your friends,” and pointed at the crew of eager cornballs she was just speaking to. Her friend was still with them, alone. Before she could respond, I turned back to Beethoven and went back to our conversation.

10 minutes later she came back, this time with her friend. It was obvious the friend was being brought over to get a look at me and give a second opinion. Women love getting the friend’s second opinion and approval.

She interrupts us again. “Hey, I came back to get my jacket.”

Exasperatedly, I say “You again? You’re just full of annoying requests, aren’t you?” I turned to her friend. “Is she always this annoying? How do you put up with it?”

She and her friend gave each other an expression that’s a mix of mock shock and laughter, mouths agape. She smiled and teased, “You’re just mad because I’m prettier than you.”

I gave her a slightly bemused look, scanned her from top to bottom like I was evaluating her, then rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.” I rolled my eyes, made them laugh, then turned back to Beethoven and my drink. In my head though I was thinking, I can’t believe the more I act like a dick, the more it works. How much farther am I supposed to go with this?

Hipster Blonde took her jacket, and she and her friend walked to the back of the bar where the couches were, occasionally turning back to look and giggle. I didn’t keep the conversation going because I knew it was a given she’d make an excuse to come back.

I walked to the back of the bar 15 minutes later to go to the bathroom. From my peripheral vision I saw Hipster Blonde and her girlfriend in the corner, tapping each other, whispering and pointing at me. Now I knew I really had her.

Sure enough after I returned to my seat at the bar, she came up behind me the moment I sat down. She asked if I had a light because she wanted to go out and smoke. I said no, but she still didn’t budge. I kept alternating between cockiness and aloofness, and she just seemed to be loving it.

No one was more shocked than me. I still couldn’t believe that this approach was actually working. It just seemed wrong and counterintuitive and the opposite of every piece of dating advice I was ever given in my life. I’m pushing my luck, I told myself. I better switch gears before I blow it. Even though my new approach was working, I told myself it couldn’t keep working and reverted to the typical approach. I decided it was a good time to give her a compliment.

“Hey, remember when you said I was mad because you were prettier than me? Well, I didn’t want to admit it, but you are quite pretty I’ve got to admit.” I gave the compliment with a nice, earnest grin. I figured after all the arrogant cockiness and insults, she deserved and would appreciate some heartfelt sweetness.

Her expression changed abruptly. Smile left, jaw dropped, silence. She suddenly looked disappointed.

She leaned in close and said slowly, in a low voice, “If you’re going to be a dog, be a rottweiller. If you’re going to be a bitch, wear a skirt.” Then she walked away.

Unlike with the night with the African, I understood Hipster Blonde’s life lesson immediately.

Best advice I ever received.

Bobby Rio from the blog The Seduction Bible asked me to do a guest post about building comfort with women. Here it is.

Enjoy.

I rarely write about a book before reading it, but the premise of this one seemed so interesting I couldn’t resist. I bought the book Radical Honesty, The New Revised Edition: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton because the premise of it seemed so challenging: brutal honesty all of the time.

In this Esquire article, a magazine writer meets Blanton and plans to practice radical honesty himself. Here’s how he describes the movement:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

When the journalist meets Blanton, he encounters a man who totally practices what he preaches:

My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I’ve had in fifteen years as a journalist. Usually, there’s a fair amount of ass kissing and diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I’d be insulting his life’s work. It’s my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it’s liberating, exhilarating.

When Blanton rambles on about President Bush, I say, “You know, I stopped listening about a minute ago.”

“Thanks for telling me,” he says.

I tell him, “You look older than you do in the author photo for your book,” and when he veers too far into therapyspeak, I say, “That just sounds like gobbledygook.”

“Thanks,” he replies.” Or, “That’s fine.”…

“I’m glad you picked your nose just now,” I say. “Because it was funny and disgusting, and it’ll make a good detail for the article.”

“That’s fine. I’ll pick my ass in a minute.” Then he unleashes his deep Texan laugh: heh, heh, heh. (He also burps and farts throughout our conversation; he believes the one-cheek sneak is “a little deceitful.”)

No topic is off-limits. “I’ve slept with more than five hundred women and about a half dozen men,” he tells me. “I’ve had a whole bunch of threesomes” — one of which involved a hermaphrodite prostitute equipped with dual organs.

What about animals?

Blanton thinks for a minute. “I let my dog lick my dick once.”

As I mentioned before, I haven’t read the book yet, but the premise really does interest me. I know that I’m just not the personality type that could totally follow the practices of the movement 100%, but I’d love to incorporate radical honesty into my life as much as I could.

What do you think life would be like if we embraced Radical Honesty all of the time? Hard to say, but here’s an example of what first dates might turn into:

Improvement over the current model or no?

Recommended Reading:

Every now and then I come across something that I wish I wrote. This piece from Craiglist’s “Best Of” section is a perfect example. It’s called “Myths and Truths,” and I’ve reproduced it in full below. I’m sure a few people will call it jaded and cynical, and it probably is, but that in no way negates how astute and accurate it is:

Myths and Truths

——————————————————————————–

Date: 2006-04-18, 11:09PM PDT

Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.

MYTH: Women want love and affection. Women want to be treated well. If you treat a woman well, she’ll treat you well.

I had a post recently called The Power of Vagueness, which you can find here. In the first post, I focused mostly on vagueness when it came to the political arena and only touched on it slightly in the dating arena. This time around I’m going to go more into the topic of vagueness in dating.

In the mail, I got my issue of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special. (I have an SI subscription.) Most of the girls in it bore me because they seem interchangeable, but this one exotic-looking black girl in it named Quiana Grant caught my eye, and I actually read her interview. One part of it really jumped out at me:

I feel a secret connection with …

Chris Webber because he is mysterious to me. I love the fact that you never hear anything about him anywhere. Even when he was dating Tyra Banks, you didn’t hear anything about him. It’s the unknown. I remember living in D.C., and the Kings came to play the Wizards, and all the ladies were in the hairdresser getting their hair done and I’m like, “What’s going on?” and they told me, “Chris Webber’s coming to town, girl!” That was kind of funny, but he’s actually, um, yeah, he’s pretty great. I was supposed to go to a game when he was playing for Philly, but then he got traded and I thought, nevermind I just wanted to see him.

I love that quote, because it perfectly illustrates what I described in the last vagueness quote. Chris Webber is a good-looking, charismatic, athletic and talented athlete, but he’s intensely private. When he does make a major statement to the public, it carries that much more weight and becomes an event because he so rarely does it. In fact, for a while it even intensified scrutiny of him because the scarcity of information about him make information about him become even more valuable.

But what I really love is how you can tell Quiana Grant has used the half-blank canvas Webber has created and filled in all the blanks herself. She’s taken every dream guy trait she has and has probably assigned them to Webber.

Of course the blank canvas alone isn’t enough. You have to have something on the canvas to attract attention in the first place. If you’re too vague or nondescript you’ll just be ignored. But Webber has the fame, athleticism and good looks that get him in the door. After that, he just has to keep his mouth shut and not fuck it up.

It amazes me how often guys don’t get this. They just talk and talk and campaign with women until they just tell too much about themselves and talk themselves right into the doghouse. Several reasons why this is bad:

1. Unless you are particularly gifted in smooth conversation, you are just increasing the chances you are going to fuck up a good first impression with each sentence you say.
2. It puts the girl on a pedestal if you are trying too hard to impress her, thereby lowering your own value in comparison. When you are talking about how smart you are, how much money you make, how cool you are, all the things that make you great, all you are doing is subconsciously convincing the girl of how great she is because you just met her and are trying to hard to gain her approval. Think about it, you don’t try to convince an ugly person of how good you look, you don’t try to convince a dumb person of how smart you are, and you don’t try to convince an uncool person of how cool you are. You expect them to get it automatically. So if you are trying too hard to convince someone you are cool, the implication is that you consider them to be even cooler. If you are trying too hard to convince someone you are good-looking, you are implying that you already consider them better-looking than you. If you are trying too hard to impress someone with how smart you are, you are implying that you consider them smart enough to judge your intelligence. Good masters don’t openly try to impress students, students openly try to impress masters. When you are too blatant in seeking approval, you broadcast to the people you’re seeking approval from that you consider them your masters. You are now in a “one-down” position from them. They may like you, but they won’t respect you as much as you want.
3. You deprive the woman of her fantasy. If for some reason you conveyed a positive first impression and got her intrigued, it’s because something about you reminded her of one of her fantasies. And each time you open your mouth to talk yourself up or impress her, you just kept painting a picture different from the one she wanted to paint. You promised her the fulfillment of a fantasy with your first impression and now you’re taking it away from her. And of course she’ll resent that, even if it’s on a subconscious level.

See, most guys have women they have no interest in that are incredibly fixated on them. They consider them pests. They make no effort to impress them, yet they stick around. Then they meet women that impress them terribly and they start campaigning hard. They call and text them too much. They watch their phones in hopes they’ll ring. They meet the girl and find her to be interested at first and get confused at why they seem to lose interest with each following interaction. What guys don’t realize is that the aloof, slightly disinterested attitude they affected with the former type of woman is the one they need to affect with the women they really like. If more men could treat the women they really like the same as they treat the ones they want to get rid of, they’d have a much better dating life. (And probably, if they pestered and tried to impress the ones they wanted to get rid of the way they do the ones they obsess over, they’d do a better job of getting rid of them.)

There’s a saying in the pimp community that touches on this concept: “The player with the right clothes can get chose with his mouth closed.” Basically, if you work on your image, whether it’s your clothing, your muscles, your body language and posture, and/or your grooming, all you have to do is work on not saying anything stupid (harder for some guys than you’d think) and being enticingly vague (but not boring) and the woman’s imagination will do all the impressing for you. As long as you don’t do anything blatantly contrary to this image, you’ll be fine.

Addendum: Something else that Chris Webber understands about vagueness: not just being vague about himself but vague about his conquests also. You never see Chris Webber brag about women he’s banging. Never. Sexual bragging is an amateurish thing the average slob does and betrays not only short term thinking but also very poor social intelligence (poor social intelligence is a huge turn-off to women).

Reputation management since time immemorial has always been of paramount importance to a woman. The sluttier a woman’s reputation is, the more her social stock drops. This is why real players rarely brag about conquests for the sake of bragging. They only bring up conquests to prove a larger point. If you get the rep of being that guy who can’t keep his mouth about conquests, women know their reputations won’t be safe with you, and no matter how much they may want you they’ll feel the risk to their reputation isn’t worth it.

Compare this to Wilmer Valderrama, who pulled a truly unmackish move in bragging on the Howard Stern show about sexual conquests. He claimed to have taken Mandy Moore’s virginity, and also:

The 26-year-old claimed Lindsay Lohan was one of the best girls he’s ever slept with, Ashlee Simpson was loud in bed and he rated Jennifer Love Hewitt an “eight” out of ten when it came to sex.

He probably thought it was cool at the time, but he must have realized his mistake because he quickly backpedaled in the press afterwards. Now what are the chances that future up and coming or established starlets are going to risk their reputations for a chance to sleep with Wilmer Valderrama. He’s proven himself to be lacking discretion and social intelligence. He should have learned the lesson of vagueness from Chris Webber.

You ever feel like society’s attempts at taking the risk out of everything are also sucking out all the spontaneity and funtoo?

I meet a lot of guys who complain about women claiming to like “nice guys” but actually preferring jerks. It’s a reassuring fiction that shields their egos, but it’s really not that simple.

Many self-proclaimed “nice guys” are rarely actually nice guys. Genuinely nice people are nice to everyone unless the person gives them a reason not to be. But with self-proclaimed “nice guys,” the only people they seem to be consistently nice to are extremely hot girls they want to bang. It’s not like these guys are running around doing nice things for fat or gruesome chicks. In fact, they’re often rude and cruel to them. Being truly nice means treating everyone well, regardless of whether they have something you want, and it means doing good things for people without expecting anything in return. For example these “nice guys” will be nice to hot women they meet at bars while rudely ignoring the hot girl’s homelier friends. Self-proclaimed “nice guys” only behave that way because they expect to be rewarded with sex or a relationship in return for their niceness (or at the very least get tossed some drunken pity pussy). It’s a transparent, passive-aggressive form of seduction and women can see right through that. Nigga, please.

But I’m not here to talk about the psychology of so-called “nice guys.” That’ll be another post. What I want to talk about is another part of the nice guy equation: why women don’t just say what they want. Why do they say they want nice guys but go with jerks? Are women just liars? Truth be told, I don’t think it’s a malicious lie so much as a natural two-part human response that people have when asked a question: (1) they want to give the answer that gives the most flattering impression of them and (2) they also go as far as to delude themselves into believing at some level that this flattering fiction is actually true. Not everyone is emotionally and psychologically strong enough to reveal unflattering truths about themselves, especially to themselves. Self-deception is a very important coping mechanism among human beings.

Regarding self-deception, consider the “illusion of invulnerability” effect found in studies conducted by Robert Levine in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold (this is going to seem like an irrelevant tangent at first, but be patient, I’ll bring it back around soon enough):

• 50% of college students said they were less naive than the average student their age and gender, only 22% said they were more naive
• 43% claimed to be less gullible than average, only 25% said they were more gullible than average.
• 46% believed themselves to be less conforming than average, only 16% said more conforming than average.
• 74% claimed to be more independent than average, only 7% said less independent.
• 77% said they had better than average awareness of how groups manipulate people; only % said they were below average

And so one and so on. The book gives plenty of other examples. Smokers think they’re less likely than other smokers to get lung cancer, which keeps them smoking. Sexually active women polled believe themselves less likely to get pregnant than other sexually active girls their age. People believe they’re 32% less likely to get fired from a job than their peers.

In fact, pessimists and depressed people may actually be the most realistic of us all. One study had clinically depressed people and psychologically normal people rate themselves and try to figure out how others viewed them. The depressed people were able to much more accurately gauge how others viewed them than the normal people. The normal group consistently overestimated the impression they made on others and had an inflated image of themselves. Another study had depressed and normal people participate in secretly rigged games where the results were fixed. The normal people routinely overestimated the degree to which personal skill contributed to the outcome when they won the rigged game, and routinely blamed outside factors when they lost. Depressed people were able to assess both situations much more realistically. Studies also show that the on average people with eating disorders actually have more accurate perceptions about strangers view their body than normal people do.

Contrary to popular belief, for the clinically depressed and those with eating disorders, their problems often stem not from irrational beliefs but from an overdose of reality and an inability to deceive themselves. Self-deception apparently keeps us sane. Take it away and give people unflinching reality and the average person’s mind will not be able to take it and their mental health will suffer.

So what does this have to do with the chick who says she wants a sensitive earnest nice guys like Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything but actually goes for Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides? You know, the woman who says she wants a sensitive softie who puts her up on a pedestal, but goes for the challenging, aloof macho guy or occasionally the outright jerk? She may not be consciously lying. Chances are, she’s deluded herself into believing that’s what she wants because it’s a reassuring fiction that feeds the self-image she desires. She may actually believe her own bullshit. Like the people in the studies I mentioned, she wants to view herself as being smarter, more resistant to manipulation and more resistant to assholdery than the average chick. She’s suffering from that illusion of invulnerability.

Now the other problem is that even when people do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves and aren’t suffering from self-deception, if you put them on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. In the 1990s for example, KFC did focus groups and surveys in their stores where they asked regular customers whether they’d try a low-calorie, low-fat, nonfried skinless chicken if it was offered. The response from customers was overwhelmingly positive. Execs took this info back to HQ and launched a healthy chicken line that was sure to be insanely popular. Only it wasn’t. It bombed horribly. What went wrong? The people didn’t tell the truth (“I’m a fat, greasy bastard that loves me some fat greasy chicken”), they instead said what they thought was the right answer (“Yes, I would eat healthy chicken if it was offered.”). The funny thing is, a little common sense and observation of the people’s actions rather than their words would have saved them a lot of grief; basically, if these people cared so much about eating healthy, why would they be regular KFC customers to begin with?

Another example of self-serving lies to total strangers is the average Nielsen family. It’s said that Nielsen families often feel self-conscious about admitting what they really like to watch because they don’t want to look bad. So they suddenly claim to watch a whole lot of PBS and documentaries and hard news when they may really be overdosing on Tila Tequila marathons and watching I Love NY 2. They didn’t want to tell the truth and be judged, as shown in this article from today’s NY Times:

I recently completed a week as a Nielsen family, an experience that only multiplied my doubts about ratings science. My sample is biased — three friends and myself — and perhaps my circle is inordinately deceitful, but everyone I know or have met who has ever responded to a Nielsen survey has told flagrant lies about his or her viewing habits. I don’t mean small lies, such as claiming never to have seen an episode of “Three’s Company.” I mean outrageous, wholesale, novelistic fictions, which, if there were enough people in America as untrustworthy as the people I know, could skew the numbers beyond reckoning…

My friend and I stayed up late one night to fill out the pamphlet. Seldom at home long enough to watch anything, she still felt obliged to support a few names that she had heard were worthwhile — Phil Donahue, MacNeil/Lehrer, Jacques Cousteau; and, together, we pretended to have seen nearly every nature documentary and news analysis show on the air.

Having told a few stretchers, we found it easy to fabricate more elaborate untruths. We decided to be married. She inked in two well-behaved children who never saw anything but “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers.” (I know another volunteer who conceived two instant children, named after her cats. They loved anything that had a fish theme.) Rather than gorging myself on sports, as is my wont, I was put on a samurai businessman’s diet of “Face the Nation” and “Wall Street Week.” The entire family lived graciously in her studio apartment, which we expanded to five rooms with a sharp $100,000 increase in my annual income…

According to my diary, I lead an ascetic life these days, estranged from wife and children. During the third week in May, the pages indicate that I watched nothing except “Bookmark,” Lewis Lapham’s high-toned book-chat show on public television. I seem to have enjoyed the program so much, I even caught a repeat broadcast and taped it on my VCR.

In fact, my week as a Nielsen volunteer coincided with the basketball playoffs, and the television was roaring for at least three hours the night or afternoon of every game. I never saw “Bookmark” that week; and I don’t know how to record on my VCR.

All the factors I describe above also apply to women when they say they want nice, sensitive sappy guys. They are either deluding themselves about what they want because that’s the kind of person they want to believe they are or they know exactly the kind of person they are but are saying what they think is the right thing to say to look like a good person or most likely a combination of the two. This is why you have to follow what Machiavelli calls the “effective truth”: judge people by the things they do, not the self-serving things they say. Robert Greene, author of 48 Laws of Power and other books, covers this extremely well in his blog:

Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. Machiavelli calls this “the effective truth,” and it is his most brilliant concept, in my opinion. It works like this: people will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way we can judge people and cut away all of this crap is by looking at their actions, the results of their actions. That is their effective truth. Take the Pope, for instance. He will sermonize forever about the poor, about morality, about peace, but in the meantime he presides over the most powerful organization in the world (in Machiavelli’s time). And his actions are basically concerned with increasing this power. The effective truth is that the Pope is a political animal, and that his decisions inevitably involve maintaining the Catholic Church’s preeminent place in the world. The religious verbiage is simply a part of his political gamesmanhip, serving as a distracting device.

In other words, don’t be the whiner that complains when people’s actions don’t measure up to their words. Words, as you can see, are unreliable for a variety of reasons. People will lead you wrong with their words, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unintentionally. But actions will always show you the truth, and it’s up to you to pay more attention to people’s actions and react accordingly. And that’s real talk.

Recommended Reading:

You often hear women, especially feminists and sluts, complaining about how it’s such an unfair double standard that men are called studs when they sleep around, yet women are called sluts. It’s really not a double standard though, because both scenarios are pretty different in terms of circumstances and consequences. I can think of at least three crucial differences.

First, sleeping around is easier for women. Regardless of how you feel about promiscuity, we can all agree that a guy who manages to rack up a lot of sexual partners has to have some skills. It’s challenging for men to rack up partners, even for men with low standards. It requires a certain amount of social intelligence, interpersonal skills, persistence, thick skin, and plain old dumb luck. For women to rack up a lot of partners, however, it pretty much only requires a vagina and a pulse. So a man whoring it up and a woman whoring it up are hardly the same thing because for a woman to get a lot of partners is absolutely no challenge, hence no one respects it. It’s just viewed as a lack of self-discipline when women indulge in lots of sex partners because they can get new ones whenever they want. When men get lots of sex partners, it’s respected more because getting lots of sex partners, for men, is a challenge. This is just human nature: people gain respect for those who accomplish challenging feats while they consider those who overindulge in easily obtained vices as weak or flawed.

Second, women do more harm by sleeping around than men do. Say a man sleeps around with a bunch of different women. He is definitely doing harm to these women if he pretends to be monogamous while sleeping around with these multiple partners. He may cause them emotional pain by his promiscuity. He may cause unwanted pregnancy. He may spread venereal diseases. When women sleep around, however, they can cause not only these same ill effects but one additional crucial ill effect: the risk of unknown parentage. If one guy sleeps around with five women, each of whom is monogamous to him, and they all get pregnant, it’s a safe bet as to who the father is. If one woman sleeps around with five men and gets pregnant, it could be anybody’s baby. And if a man is tricked into raising a baby that isn’t his, he is basically investing his time, money, estate and property to provide for a child that is not carrying on his DNA into the next generations, which is a costly mistake from an evolutionary standpoint. Our two basic primal drives are to survive and to reproduce, and promiscuous women traditionally make it hard for a man to know for sure whether he is truly reproducing or simply raising another man’s child. Men stand a lot more to lose from promiscuous women than the other way around. And it’s no picnic for the child to not know who his real father is either. And it’s a mess for the women carrying on the deception as well. Or just look at any random episode of the Maury show if you don’t believe me. Considering that the DNA test and the birth control pill had not existed for most of human history, meaning that there were no reliable ways to prevent pregnancy or prove parentage, society for many centuries had a vested interest in preventing promiscuity among women and society accomplished this by creating the slut stigma. And even though the creation of birth control and DNA tests have made this less of a risk than the past, longstanding traditions and customs are not easy for society to break.

Third, men have evolutionary reasons to be programmed to sleep around. A lot of women roll their eyes when they hear that men are “hard-wired” to sleep around. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes total sense. If the two primal drives of humans are to survive and to reproduce, nothing leads to maximum reproduction like one man sleeping with multiple women. If one women slept with many men, in a nine month period, she would still only get pregnant just once. Nine months of rampant promiscuity would give the same result as nine months of highly sexed monogamy: one pregnancy. Now if one man sleeps with many women, you can get many pregnancies. The more women he sleeps with, the more pregnancies. So from an evolutionary standpoint, there are concrete advantages to men sleeping around with multiple partners rather than women.

These three reasons are probably why the longstanding tradition came about of men being rewarded for multiple partners while women get socially punished for similar promiscuity. Of course all this is gradually changing, but we’re up against centuries of tradition here, so don’t expect any dramatic reversals or anything.

Now a lot of people are going to read all this and dismissively think Oh this guy is just being a typical man and trying to justify every man’s dream: cheating and polygamy. But believe it or not, I don’t really think male polygamy is all it’s cracked up to be. Despite what most people assume, polygamy actually may benefit women more than men. Most dudes think a society of widespread polygamy (specifically polygyny, where one man can have several women) would just be a utopia of every guy sleeping with every woman under the sun. Some economists think otherwise though. The basic argument is that in a world where po

lygamy was acceptable, most of the women would be hoarded by the most successful men. As explained in this Psychology Today article:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…..Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group. The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males.

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

When there is resource inequality among men?the case in every human society?most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

So basically, women complain about how men are allowed to sleep around and they aren’t. Meanwhile men wish polygamy had widespread acceptance. And the truth may actually be that male polygamy benefits the average women more than the average man. Who’da thunk?