This Practice Made Men Arouse Me, Which Is Unsettling

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. This is why now, locked in eye contact, it was absolutely disconcerting that my vagina was wet. This had never happened to me before.

I’m not exactly a noob to seduction. 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, reddit’s r/seduction, joined ‘game’ chat rooms where the men circled me like sharks around blood in the water. I learned about compliance testing, kino escalation, oneitis. I liked getting seduced well, and would sometimes explicitly identify a man’s techniques to his face before sleeping with him.

So when I found this stranger successfully generating arousal in me without using a single seduction technique, I was intrigued and a little terrified. This was beyond my rather extensively developed models! It was not in my worldview that someone could be hot by staring at me and using energy or whatever.

I was hooked. I kept working with this coaching, as an assistant. The structure was that a man would stand before me, and we’d stare at each other. Then the coach would come around and give small corrections and feedback. “It seems like you’re cut off from your stomach,” the coach would say. “Move your shoulders up and back.” The guy would move his shoulders. “Relax your butthole.” The guy’s butthole presumably unclenched. “Did your mom do this to you?” the coach would ask. “You’re searching for her approval”, “it’s okay to feel this”, “say it again but into the ground,” he would say. At one point I heard him say “Bite me, bitch.” The coach was weird and charming; a 32-year-old broad shouldered man inexplicably wearing a backwards baseball cap. He seemed to straddle the line between random wildness and uncanny perceptivity.

I’d pay close attention to my own experience. I’d say whatever I felt was true for me in connection with the men, even if it didn’t make sense or I didn’t understand it. “I feel afraid of you,” or “I want to hurt you,” or “I feel motherly towards you.”

I’d never sat and stared hard at my own experience about a man in front of me before, at least not in a coaching context where I was explicitly framed as an object of desire, against which men were working through their issues with women.

“Do you want to fuck her?” The coach asked the man before me. “Yes,” said the man, locked in eye contact with me. “I don’t believe you,” I said, because I didn’t. The man took a breath, settled down into himself, and said again “I want to fuck you.” I eyed him, and checked inside my body if I felt like I trusted him. “Okay, I think I believe you,” I said.

I noticed that with each man, with each question, my careful meditative attention kept falling towards the same place, like there was a gravity well inside me. I wanted to know - what do you want?

I searched for it in their eyes, in their bodies, in the tone of their voice, the speed of their breathing. I noticed that actually quite a bit of the way I felt around these men depended on the degree to which I believed they were trying to conceal what they wanted.

For me, what they wanted didn’t matter so much, it was just how visible the want was. One of the men made me feel tense; I felt wary and shut down in connection with him. The coach worked with him for a long time, and eventually we reached a point where the man told me, with a spark of raw genuineness, that he was furious that he wanted to have sex with me, furious with the power I held over him that he’d never asked for, that he wanted to rip me apart. I was surprised to find that with this, my tension relaxed - because here, finally, he wasn’t concealing. In laying himself out honestly before me, it was also not for me; we were staring at each other, but he spoke the truth into the floor, into the world, owned and full and unapologetic. It wasn’t to try to get me to view him a certain way. It was completely independent of me. And with that, my brain compulsively flashed a visual of us having sex.

This kept happening with the other men. The things they concealed were all different, or for different reasons, but each time a man touched a state of letting me see directly what he wanted, I found him slipping into a sexual frame.

For me (and probably most women), men enter by default into the “friendzone frame”. I meet them, say hello, and they are nice and polite and no part of my attention goes to checking my genitals, or theirs. Sexual energy feels off the table. This is an explicit thing pickup artists try to subvert; when interacting with a target, you want to make sure you keep yourself in a sexual frame in her mind, so that somewhere in her subconscious she’s continually evaluating you in sexual terms, not nice guy terms where the idea of doing sex is as weird and impossible as the thought of doing traditional paintbrush making in Taipei. You want to demonstrate you are unafraid of sex, that you don’t find a sexual context with her intimidating - so you do things like casually reference your own cock, or make a context-appropriate joke asking if that laugh is what her sex noises sound like, etc.

This is what I mean by sexual frame - I was surprised to find that each time a man seemed to me like he stepped fully embodied into revealing to me what he wanted, even if the want itself might seem offputting or shameful, I found my brain shifted him into the sexual frame category - like I’d just been talking to a friend who got back from a paintbrush-making apprenticeship in Taipei and laid out how she did it and offered me a paid scholarship for next spring. I might not actually go, but it had moved into a clear, concrete space of touchable possibility. I started evaluating him as a potential sexual mate, where it hadn’t been even considering that option before.

This felt like the orange-on-a-tree to pickup artistry’s orange-flavor juice. While pickup artistry often involved slightly warping yourself to becoming a probability-of-sex-maximizing-machine, this practice felt more like surrender; instead of sex-goal orientation, this was letting go in full honesty. It was that ancient annoying trick of getting the thing you want through not trying to get the thing you want.

The meta game of revealing wants was fascinating too, because many of the men seemed to be aware on some level that being vulnerable and honest was attractive, and so attempted, presumably subconsciously, to present themselves vulnerably in order to gain my approval. I found that by the end of it, basically all of my attention went towards authenticity-detection. Did my body, on some gut level, really believe them? Did it believe the man was hiding something, whether he was aware of it or not? It was a full body, very subtle, energetic experience. I was a bit surprised at how good I felt at it, and I wondered how much this had evolved as a deep feminine skill - the ancient rivalrous game of men doing a bluster and women squinting their eyes and detecting a bluster. It was well beneath my conscious thought; I either trusted him or I didn’t.

The coach explained this in terms of embodied communication. His frame was that people’s bodies subconsciously close off parts of themselves, learned from past coping mechanisms or trauma, and that these shut off parts limit the capacity of connection with others. This seemed compatible with my own frame - I was staring at these men trying to figure out what they wanted; if they had parts of their bodies closed off, it made sense that some subconscious part of me was registering this as a black hole of ??? and spending lots of cycles trying to figure out what the hell was hiding under the table between us.

The coach said that men came to him usually to improve their relationships with women - to be more attractive to women, to allow women to feel more connected with them, to be more sexually satisfied with women - but that the best way to do this in practice was to get deeply in touch with themselves. I am surprised at how true this is.

It’s possible that this embodied connective work isn’t the most efficient thing for getting indiscriminately laid - that would probably be hiring an escort or becoming a famous billionaire, and then maybe followed up by pickup artistry. But I’d guess it’s surprisingly effective for getting laid in healthier ways with more compatible people. With the men in this coaching, it was like some sort of filter came off, and instead of having a blanket desexualized “I might as well become a paintbrushmaker in Taipei,” I was able to look directly at how much I sexually vibed with each person in a clear, raw state. And some people I still didn’t want to have sex with, but some people, I was absolutely shocked to find, I did. My guess is that this training is especially good to help men present themselves without the filter, so that when a woman actually does resonate with him, that she’ll be able to feel it clearly in his presence.

If you’re interested in this coaching, I’m continuing to assist in it and may end up co-running some of it with the original coach. Submit your email here if you’d like to be contacted for future events.