This is the the fourth of eight articles on love, sex and gender. As with the others, it stands on its own, but you can read through part 1, on man and woman, part 2 on sex and excitement, part 3 on emotion and habit, part 5 on solipsism and sex, part 6 on making love, part 7 on marriage and part 8 on eternal love.

Approaching Woman

Man moves and woman is moved. Man looks and woman is looked at. Man leads and woman is led. Naturally, there are exceptions, because nature delights in breaking rules and upsetting expectations, thank God, but a man who cannot lead is as unhappy as a woman who insists on being in charge.

Man’s authority is primarily in the public or manifest realm. Privately, primally, he is following her heart. Not her emotions, and certainly not her will, but the strange quality of her innermost, which is, like his own, one with the music. If he is dancing to that tune, she will gladly follow him to the edge of doom.

Just as a man who cannot lead is unhappy, so a society, one such such as ours, in which men no longer publicly lead (or must do so through force), is also unhappy. The great dance breaks down, and everyone has to do their own thing (or rather, everyone has to do their own thing, and so the dance breaks down).

The first step in the dance is for a man to approach a woman. This could be a literal approach, talking to a woman on the bus, for example, or it could be asking a girl out that he already knows, at work or at college. In either case, he approaches her. If he waits for her to approach him, he’ll attract unhappy women.

Most men, being repressed cowards, use tactics and techniques to approach women (chiefly the cowardly tactic of not approaching them at all). He will be nice and polite for example and attempt to wriggle his way into her interest by being a friendly friend. This, to his deep dismay, never works.

Or he will ask hundreds of questions. Or he will manoeuvrer himself into being useful. Or he will boast and try and win her with his credentials. Or he’ll try to buy her with his fame or his money. Or he will engineer time alone with her and sidle up to her and sort of hope that perhaps she sort of gets the message.

Some women, very few, but some, will be taken in by such crude and feeble tactics. Others might be desperate and ignore his clumsiness in exchange for his attention. It might even be possible that, underneath his fearful faffing, she perceives a man of character. But this is unlikely. Most likely, he’s just a child.

Man fails with women because he does not understand that she does not evaluate him mentally, but physically. She senses, in her body, that he is bluffing, that he is concealing his desire for her by being polite (or, if he is particularly immature trying to conceal his fear and hatred of her by being obnoxious).

A woman is essentially a Reichian therapist,1 able to intuitively detect, through her physical awareness of the tensions in his face and in his body, that a man’s psyche is locked up. She can rarely articulate quite what part of his self is imprisoned or why, but her intuitive guesses are often miraculously accurate.

Naturally, I am speaking of a conscious woman here, and women do tend to be more conscious than men; but most women are unconscious, slaves to their emotions and only able to evaluate men in terms of those emotions; which usually comes down to a crude assessment of how much power he has.

That said, she is less attached to her evaluations than he is. Ask her what kind of man she goes for, and although she might (for example) offer a horrifying exemplar of caricatured masculinity as an ideal; she is usually willing to give up this ideal in the presence of a man with presence.

This is why extremely ugly men can do so amazingly well with women. She says she wants a square jaw, thick hair, nice hands, wide shoulders and so on,2 but she’ll give it all up in a trice for a man with strength of character, passion for genuine mastery and an empathic awareness of what the hell is going on.

Some men, understanding all this, learn pick-up skills, in order to bypass her mind and manipulate her emotions; to compel her, through references to sex, physical contact, ungrasping assertiveness, suggestive body-language and so on, to unplug her brain and continually evaluate him in sexual terms.

By using the tricks of a pick-up artist3 a man (any man) can, with some practice, learn to manipulate woman (not any woman) through a combination of raising her emotional temperature, suppressing her critical powers and appealing to her biological weaknesses, into a date and, eventually, into bed.

Not that manipulation is all bad. Up to a point, women like to be ‘manipulated’4 — men too, if the pilot is confident, experienced and skilful. Men who relinquish public control and let interaction with women fall into a vortex of consultation (‘I dunno what do you fancy?’) tend to get dumped, or get saddled with a virago.

At the heart of pick-up scene are (or were, it is now a prudish ‘post-game’ world) some sensible and laudable principles, above all, to learn to be — indeed, to actively work at becoming — attractive to women and capable of handling the excruciating demands of talking to an attractive girl you don’t know.

Thus, many pick-up artists really did become ‘better versions of themselves’, better dressed, better read, healthier, more socially confident, more emotionally aware, more physically intuitive, more comfortable with ambiguity and more sensitive to the subtle cues of tone, body language and unspoken implication.

But love plays no part in technique, which is why women who fell victim to the predatory arts of the pick up artist so often felt used and exploited, and why men who were attracted to the the scene, including so-called ‘masters of the art’, were so often small, broken creatures, incapable of love.

Today the PUA scene has mutated into the ‘manosphere’, a place where young man gravitate after being told that they are privileged rapists who haven’t dealt with their toxicity. Here, they discover they are understood by other men who understand nothing about women beyond warped versions of PUA technique.

Being a technique, woman can learn counter-techniques to defend herself, against the pick-up artist and ‘incel’, but she is defenceless, and loves to be defenceless, before a man who hides nothing, and who does not use any technique, or force, to manipulate her; who openly loves her, without sexuality.

Such a man is not ashamed of loving her, from moment one. Today it sounds like the nuclear option to walk up to a lass you don’t know and say ‘I love you’,5 but, believe it or not, in the right spirit this can work. Whatever you say though, such conscious pluck is a prerequisite to all interactions with all women.

Genuinely loving men are affectionate and chivalrous to all women (or all women who will let him, which is, alas, a diminishing circle) but attracted or drawn to only a few. If the circumstances are right, he will then naturally and openly pursue her and she will then respond to him sexually and romantically.

She may well be surprised at who it is that she is responding to, because it’s very often not the kind of man she thought she liked at all. Such erotic surprise is impossible through the screen, which can only appeal to calculating thought and to selfish emotion and so does not require sensitivity or courage.

The aura of the moment, of him and of her, cannot pass through the screen, which precludes the subtle dance from whence romance emerges. The glance, the smile, the tone, the scent, the rich silence; none of this exists on the screen. Qualities die when the internet pulls them from the ocean they swim in.

The Audacity of Courtship

First of all then, a woman invites a man. He might need to force his foot into the door to give himself a chance — to interrupt her momentum, and get her attention — but unless he manipulates her through pick up tricks, he needs her invitation to proceed and he violates her if he goes where he is unwelcome.

Once he has knocked on the door (or twice perhaps, three times at the most… she can respond to a bit of persistence you know), and seen that, through the way she looks at him, through her posture, and through the quality of her voice, that she is giving him a chance, then he may try his hand with a conversation.

The conversation, if it is to succeed, must be unplanned.6 It must draw its inspiration not from the past, but from the moment, responding to the situation they are both in, and responding to her, as she is, in this situation. This is difficult for man, who is less well acquainted with the situation than she is.

But this works for him. The very difficulty of throwing himself into the void of the moment, unscripted, without a technique, can earn him what he longs for, a slightly impressed smile. Why would he want it to be easy? Only a child needs stabilisers and floats. A man dives in, even though he may drown.

If he persists with her, uninvited, he doesn’t stand a chance. If he is grasping and starey, if he sticks tediously to his plans and to his knowledge, or if he tries to win her by force or by bragging, he doesn’t stand a chance. And if he is afraid of her, sweating, gulping and stuttering, he doesn’t stand a chance.

Probably! For woman, strange creature that she is, and despite what she might say, does not respond to the explicit, literal fact. She hears what he says, but she is listening to what he does not say. If he is clumsy, robotic or violent he can still possess spirit. He can win her heart by breaking all the rules.

Today we live in a world dominated by literal laws, a ‘no means no’ society that demands explicit consent at every stage of courtship, right up to orgasm. This makes it impossible for man to prove his mettle, which is to say his judgement. He no longer knows when to break the rules, when to be audacious.

There are some advantages to such a world; every form that the nightmare takes allows for a reflected version of waking. Today women are better protected from the force that permissive societies allow, if for no other reason than that men now lack the energy to kick down her door. But at what cost?

There are few things a real woman responds to so well as to audacity, but he must know the right time for it. She expects him to know when he should ignore everything she is saying and abseil into her bedroom, and when the game is up. He should, in short, be able to read her heart as well as the room it is in.

Man tends to lack either sensitivity or courage. Some men are quiveringly aware of what is going on in women but lack the balls to do anything about it. Others are swashbuckling heroes (or think themselves to be) but haven’t the foggiest what’s going on in her belly. We call the former cowards and the latter bastards.

The bastard, usually found in the upper and lower end of the social scale,7 must learn to perceive the aura of phenomena, the quality of things, the vibe of the room. He must learn to quieten his will, so that the strange voice of unself can speak to him. Then his audacity will have a purpose nobler than gratification.

The coward, whose home is the middle-class, must learn to act despite how he feels. For courage is not feeling no fear at all — which is psychopathy — but acting despite it. Thus, even though man sweats and stutters and flaps around, his character, manifest through his courage, may still charm her.8