“You prefer to be on the bottom?” I ask her
by 
Eric Disco
On the wall in front of us, projected 20 feet high, is a video of a guy holding his penis.
He’s playing his balls like he’s strumming an electric guitar.
I’m at an art gallery opening with Lee.
We’re standing in a room with an installation piece projecting full-frontal male nudity.
On the other side of the room, I notice a very cute girl. She’s artsy and dressed to the nines.
I walk away from Lee and go over and stand next to her, looking at the projection.
“We’re relying on you to explain the meaning of this to us,” I say to her.
“I got nothing,” she says with a smile.
“What? You look like the expert.”
She laughs. “I have no idea what’s going on there.”
I look at her. “You have no penis… guitar playing experience? ” I look back up at the video.
“Not my specialty. I’ve never done that.”
“Never?”
“No. Have you?”
“Hey,” I say, “what guy hasn’t strummed out a few power chords on his penis?”
She laughs again.
“So I take it this isn’t your piece here?” I ask.
“Oh no. I don’t have any pieces here.”
“You’re just observing?”
She tells me that she’s here supporting her friend. She tells me a bit about how she knows her friend.
“You strike me as an artist as well,” I say. “Wait, don’t tell me what you do, I’m gonna guess. I’m really good at this.” I look her up and down.
“Lemme see your hand,” I say. She gives me her hand.
I hold her hand and say, “Send me some psychic waves.”
She closes her eyes.
“Nothing dirty,” I say. “Keep it clean.”
I let go of her hand. She still has her hand out. “Okay, you can put your hand down now,” I say.
“I was still sending you waves,” she says.
“Oh yeah? It’s a very complex thing that you do. You’re a dolphin trainer.”
“I wish,” she says. “I do scuba diving, so maybe that was the vibe you were getting.”
“You’re a fashion designer,” I say.
“I was.”
“And now you’re done with that,” I say.
She tells me she designs prints for textiles. And that she’s going to be a yoga instructor.
“You didn’t pick up on the yoga, did you?” she says.
“It was the glittery shoes that threw me off,” I say. “You teach?”
“I teach my first class on Monday,” she says, beaming a smile.
“Are you excited?” I say.
“I’m really pumped.”
“You’ve never taught a class before?”
“No.”
“Are you nervous?”
“I was nervous last week.”
“Now you’re done, you’re over the nervousness?” I ask.
We talk a bit more about yoga. It’s time to turn the conversation to me.
“So guess what I do,” I tell her.
Eventually I tell her I’m a writer.
“What do you write about?” she asks. They always ask.
“I like to tell stories-but true stories. Stories about my life. I feel like very few people can tell a good story. When one person tells another person a good story, it’s like their brains are having sex.”
“So the person telling the story is on top and the other person on the bottom is listening…” she says going with the sex analogy.
“Right.”
“I get that,” she say.
“Are you good at telling stories?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” she says.
“Or you prefer to be on the bottom,” I say.
“I prefer both. Switching it up,” she says.
“You got a good story?” I ask.
“I don’t.”
“What if I gave you a topic?”
“Maybe..” she says.
“I’m not gonna say penis guitar-playing, because that would be too easy.”
From there, the interaction winds down. We exchange contact info and she contacts me later that night.
Posted in Field Reports | 
30 Comments »
Great job Eric very natural conversation and you use lots of the stuff you talk about- talking about sex, touching, turning attention towards you, bantering…
This is awesome. Great to see it in action. Do you always say something out there like dolphin trainer before guessing her real occupation or was that actually your first guess?
I usually do. Unless I feel like the interaction needs to be more meaningful at that point rather than bantery.
I sometimes guess that she’s a professional juggler, part of an all-girl juggling troupe.
Eric
Hahah cool story man. I love the way you opened by asking her if she was the expert, that pretty much set you up for a sexual interaction right away.
Smooth.
Very flirty, indeed! Great job man.
Nothing like a guy playing his dick like a guitar to inspire an opener!
let us know if she plays your dick and joins your band!
GlennP
Wow. Very impressed. I definitely need to step it up like this.
Any idea what to do when your brain doesn’t permit you to say these things? Flirtatious lines are usually in my head but they don’t come out. On the rare occasions that they do come out, they’re very quiet and I look like a fool. It’s like there’s 2 people in my head–one that’s a natural that knows what to do, and a more powerful one that says ‘are you out of your mind? This is forbidden territory. Go home and play on the internet. Occasionally the ‘natural’ personality wins out, but that’s about once every two years.
By the way–this isn’t for lack of practice. I practice. A LOT. But words don’t come out.
Firstly, you want to get comfortable saying just anything. Start with non-flirtatious lines. If you aren’t comfortable saying boring things–like “Who’s the artist?”–you won’t be comfortable saying more flirty things. In fact, that night, I started out warming up by saying non-flirty things to people. I always do.
If you’re already in an interaction, it’s possible you will feel inhibited from saying flirty things. My recommendation is to start off with one line that you really like, and use that. Get comfortable with it. Maybe it’s something simple like, “You guys look like trouble.”
Everyone gets inhibited. Even me. Earlier that night I was in an interaction with another woman where I felt more inhibited. That’s okay. That doesn’t mean I’ve failed. On the contrary, it means I’m pushing my comfort zone.
Eric
@MrAntiquity
At some point, you will have to come to terms with something Eric and I have been saying all along. If you have some social anxiety, you can’t teach yourself to be more relaxed and spontaneous at the same time. You can be more spontaneous… which will terrify you and make you stiff and unnatural. Or you can say the same thing every time, which will not be at all spontaneous but will help relax you. I strongly suggest you take the second path. When you are really relaxed saying the same thing every time, you can become more spontaneous. The other way is really hard and may take years.
–Lee
@Lee-
That’s the path I tried to take when I started all of this–I did it a lot. It never got easier. Everyone who posts about this stuff says that the more you practice, the easier it gets–for me, the more I practiced, the worse it got. I’ve run into almost no one who seems to have the same difficulty–which is why I think there are other things going on in my head and why I’m trying this other approach…
What was it you tried that did not work? Be specific.
even simple things–like ‘hi’. Very difficult to do. If I know that the point is to further the interaction–even just to get into a conversation, I get stuck. I’ve used your advice before–ask for directions, then use something like ‘are you always this kind to strangers?’ My stock phrase was, if I saw they were thinking a bit, ‘Wait a minute..you’re just making this up as you go along, aren’t you :)’ it let me throw in a tease, and further the conversation. But then the pressure gets too great and i get overwhelmed.
See, with me, the more positive the response is, the more terrified I get. Since I know that I usually DO get a good response when I’m able to approach women, I refuse to approach anymore. That may not make sense, but it’s because, in my history, good responses have ultimately been false so I hold myself back from taking that road. The resistance is about as strong as if I were going to walk in front of a train.
This is what I’ve been trying to let go of so that I can start dating. I know what to do–but I’ve spent ages trying to let myself do it.
It seems to me that when you did try the advice I usually give here, you short undermined yourself by short circuiting the process and trying to be too clever. After directions, you should ask for complicated directions, again without any intention of going further. You have to do that until complicated directions are easy for you to ask for. Those head scratchers are what makes it easy for you to say “Well, thanks anyway. That was very kind of you. Are you always this kind to strangers?” After this, you should walk away and do it again and again until it causes you no distress. In your attempt to be more clever – to use a funny banter line – “Wait a minute.. you’re just making this up as you go along aren’t you :-)” – you put additional pressure on yourself to be spontaneous. If I were in your shoes, that line would not relax me for the simple reason that it ups the ante without telling me exactly where to go next. The uncertainty about what comes next is what’s making you nervous and by trying to be randomly clever, you made that uncertainty worse. There is no follow up to your banter line. The follow up to my line is very natural and completely congruent with asking her whether she’s always kind to strangers: “I’m getting the sense you’re a people person. What do you do, sister? Do you read, do you write, do you sing, do you dance?” I suspect you did two things that ultimately messed you up. 1) You left the script and put yourself into spontaneous banter territory too early. 2) You didn’t do enough repetitions of the exercise of pulling out after asking her whether she is always this kind to strangers. Before you conclude that you are a special case and need to re-write the entire methodology of teaching pickup, try performing these simple exercises for a month. You’ve gone the other way without much to show for it. Now, try going back to the beginning.
–Lee
One more thing. For people in your position, “hi” is one of the hardest things to open with. Why? Because it subjects you to immediate judgement and leaves you in a position of complete uncertainty. It’s judgement that all of us ultimately fear – some combination of judgement by a woman, judgement by our friends, and judgement by strangers. When we don’t have a really good image of ourselves, the fear of judgement by others stops us from taking chances. When you open with hi, a woman immediately knows why you are there and what you probably want. She has to make an immediate decision about you. The thing about directions and gradual escalation is there really is no moment of judgement. A conversation arises out of small steps, each of which a woman tacitly accepts. That’s the way to lose your anxiety. Say the same thing every time. Don’t try to be clever. Stick to a simple script. Practice each step until the anxiety is gone or very, very manageable.
–Lee
@Eric–
That’s something I’ve been working on–what’s annoying is that I had a breakthrough about 3 years ago where I DID feel like I could just freely interact–then it seems to have shut down to a point where it got much worse. It’s as if I pushed things too far and had too much freedom, so had to restrict it…
It’s strange.
@Lee–
Thanks for all that–yeah, I do have a tendency to shift things around. I”ll try to use the method more tightly and see what happens–although I often shut down before I even start. I’ll give it some times, though.
Eric you crack me up. You create a website as a forum to offer your advice about how to approach women etc etc. You then write up a story within your site depicting yourself as the main character, featuring yourself applying your own advice down to the smallest detail and finding much success with it. Of course none of this story can be verified or proven to be true. This is text book manipulation in attempts to validate the advice you give and to give validation to this website. Please don’t misunderstand, on occasion the advice you’ve offered has validity but you my friend are a phony.
@Curtman42
Dude, before the black helicopters come to take you away to Area 54 to have your belly button probed by the Free Masons, get a grip on yourself long enough to examine the facts. There are at least two dozen guys who regularly post here who are former satisfied students of Eric’s. I am a former student of Eric’s. There are at least a half dozen guys who regularly post on here who have seen me in action. All of you – yes, even the most irrational skeptics – have an open invitation to watch me do my thing absolutely free of charge… provided, of course, you come to this site and tell everyone what you saw. That’s a free, live preview. You’re not going to get that anywhere else. What other kind of proof can you possibly want? Videos? Videos suck because you don’t know how many times a coach blows out to get one good video. The proof is live observation of a coach in action. Does any other site give you that? Never.
–Lee
Hey Curtman,
No worries. I’m honored that you think this was too good to be real. I take that as a compliment.
Eric
@Lee
To me, Curtman42 looks like a typical case of drive-by-criticism you so often find on the Web
@Lee
Hey, stop with the dreaming. Show proof with pictures of you and girls. You work at a high ranking NY uni and you know everything need to be backed up by facts. You say you will demo, but all I see is another PUA trying to make more money. Step up, instead of just writing on a blog.
Sebastian
Ha! That’s your standard of proof, pictures? Dude, if I go out with a camera and a friend, I can get all the pics I want like this: “Girls, you look amazing tonight. I wonder if you can help me with something important. I’m in love with this girl but she won’t give me the time of day. Can I take a pic with you to make her jealous?” Do you know how easy that is to do? I say it again: the gold standard of proof is watching a coach approach a girl you pick out. There is no faking that. There are a bunch of guys on this site who’ve taken me up on my offer. It’s an offer very few coaches are prepared to make.
–Lee
Ha, I love that opener. Maybe I should try that to get a bunch of pics for my online dating profile, lol.
BTW, I respect the hell out of you and I’m totally down to meet up in person. How could I make that happen? I live in Manhattan.
@KL
Shoot me an email at lee@effortlessgame.com and we’ll set up a time to hang. There’s a small group of us who go out about once a week. Or it can be just the two of us if you want to chat. Either way, it’ll be good to finally put a face to the name.
–Lee
Nice conversation! freeflowing, funny, interesting!
Makes me smile and feel good!
Thanks for your story Eric!
To Eric and Lee, how do you make openers that don’t sound awkward? I find myself in situations like the one in the story (albeit in many different places) but I find it hard pressed to sound natural and be able to carry on the banter. I would think up an opener, then some part of me counter thinks and puts the idea down as something lame. By then the opportunities are lost.
@Phil
95% of the time, I use two openers: Deep Thoughts if she is alone, and Conversation About Boys if there is more than one girl. The banter in Eric’s article is great, but it’s also kinda rare for him to go off script like this. He mostly sticks to a few openers as well. As he says in one of his previous articles, saying the same thing every time calms you.
–Lee
what is deep toughts opener ??
You look like you’re thinking deep, deep thoughts. Are you? (Pause to let her answer) You know, I read an article recently that said we spend something like 12% of our lives thinking of things we’re not going to act on. That’s an 8th of my life. I thought, wow, what would I do with that time if I could have it all back. And I decided that if I got an 8th of my life back, I would make a list of the 100 greatest novels ever written and make my way through that list. (Pause) What would you do?