Close to three years ago I wrote a column for this paper entitled “How to Attract Women.” It was done with humor and started with the following lines: “Although I have been married for more than 40 years, men who come in contact with me, and especially those who meet my wonderful wife, know that once upon a time I knew the secrets of how to attract highly desirable women. I still know these secrets, but they are as much use to me now as E-Z pass is to a man without a driver’s license.”
I have a blog on Psychologytoday.com and I later posted that piece on it, with the subtitle “Humorous advice from a man long out of the game.” To my amazement — and probably because when men saw the title, in their desperation they didn’t even realize it was meant to be mostly humorous — it eventually rose to #1 on the Google search page for “how to attract women.”
Though I am in a constant (and typically losing) battle with my ego, I must admit that I was not pleased when I checked back one day, after my post had been at #1 for several months, to find that my position at the top of the page had been usurped by “Techniques for Attracting Women: From Sonic Seduction.”
Clearly, this was not meant to be humorous. And who knows, maybe these were practices that worked. I thought wistfully that if such wondrous techniques had been available when I was young and single, I might have done better than with some of the opening lines I actually did use, such as “Do you play chess?”
I had to know. What were these “sonic seduction techniques”?
To be honest, it’s hard to find them — which makes sense, because someone wants you to pay money to really get the program — but here, from one relevant web page, is a hint at what the man on the make should be doing:
“Do not just focus on a single (meaning “one”) woman right now. The last thing that you would want is to obsess over a woman whom you deem to be irreplaceable. If you date several women at once, you won’t become needy or clingy in any way. Remember that having multiple relationships is not necessarily bad.” (The bold types and italics are in their text.)
Well, I guess that having multiple relationships is not necessarily bad, but I wouldn’t call it admirable or good.
Then there is something about a “fractionation technique,” but when you look it up, there are all kinds of warnings about its power. For example, here’s a description from another website. It starts out with this: “Seduction techniques have evolved, and the more popular methods such as the Rising Sun, the October Sequence, and the Death Pattern (what?!) all have become an inspiration for Derek Rake to create and develop his own technique called ‘Fractionation Formula.’” Briefly, fractionation is described as a technique leaning heavily on “hypnosis, psychology and persuasion.”
Well, I think I’ve read just about enough. That my sweet and innocent “How to Attract Women” — with its chief suggestion being that the best thing to say to a woman you’re interested in is “Hi” — could have its #1 Google placement taken over by the above kind of manipulative seduction techniques shows me how crass and cold this world has become. What has happened to young men today that any of them could even consider using this kind of “mind control” to bed young women?
But, to be fair, women have their own seduction techniques too. You can find some of them on Lovepanky.com, which includes a page providing ways “to seduce a man who’s not yet yours” and offering such tidbits as these: “Just watching a man feel flustered and awkward because of the sexual tension you’ve created is a rush that few things can give a girl.” And “The fascinating thing about being a woman is that you can do something outrageous like wearing extremely short skirts and plunging necklines and still blame a man for being a pervert.”
You know, maybe it wasn’t so bad living in a simpler time, when I could feel like an idiot because, on at least one occasion, the first thing I said to an attractive girl I saw across the room was “Do you play chess?”
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