The Reality Method 2.0

What Nightclubs are Good For

Ahh, nightclubs. Where to begin?

Popular destination for the young and horny (and old and lonely), purveyors of an ephemeral product called “atmosphere” and “crowd”, master manipulators of marketing and word-of-mouth buzz, nightclubs are a rich venue for male-female interaction.

Having done my own stint working in nightclubs (big and small, alcoholic and non, well-managed and chaotic) for many years, it’s hard for me to know exactly where to start with this topic; I suppose the best place is at the beginning.

What a Nightclub REALLY Is
Stupid question, you might say. A nightclub is just a big empty space with a bar or two that sells alcohol, occasionally food (although it’s mandated in some states), and has a sound system for playing loud “popular” music. Most nightclubs also have lots of flashy, blinky lights and odd decorations, maybe a disco ball, some bathrooms, and a secluded area for “private” parties or special patrons.

A nightclub is not just stupid lights and music, though. A nightclub is not even alcohol or an opportunity to do drugs with like-minded people right under the cop’s noses.

A nightclub, my friends, is people.

The draw of a nightclub — the reason people keep going down there and paying a ridiculous cover to get into that big, empty space with loud obnoxious music and schizophrenic lights — is because that empty space fills up with people. People go to clubs to see other people, and to be seen themselves.

A nightclub is the modern-day equivalent to what in the animal kingdom is called a “lek” — a place where males and females of the species go to hook up. The word “lek” is Swedish for “play”, and the practice of going to leks to mate is called “lekking” (”playing”). Peacocks do it; grouse do it; various birds of paradise, including manakins, do it; antelope, deer, bats, fish, butterflies and moths all do it. Humans do it, but they don’t call it “lekking” — they call it “clubbing”.

At a lek, all the males of the species line up, mark out territories, and begin showing off their seductive wares to the females - who generally wander around, survey the selection, and finally make a decision of which male to mate with.

Is this sounding familiar yet? If not, you haven’t been to enough nightclubs. This is *exactly* the sort of behavior that men and women engage in while out at clubs: the men, mostly in groups, find their “table” or corner (territory) and mark it off, claiming temporary ownership over it. The women, also mostly in same-sex groups, run around like things possessed — drinking, now dancing, now going to the bathroom as a group, now drinking again, now getting hit on by guys, now running away to go dance again.

If any guy is good enough to nail a girl to a single spot for a half-hour or more and knows what to say, he stands a pretty good chance of going home with her.

Nightclubs are about hooking up; anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit (if you’ll excuse my French). Girls will tell you ALL THE TIME about how they go to nightclubs “just to dance” or “just to party with my friends” or “just to have fun”. Don’t believe a word of it. Realize that, they have to say those things to prevent themselves from looking like sluts. If they admitted to the truth: “I go to nightclubs to drink, dance, get hit on by boys, and hopefully get fucked really well” — they would be scorned and ostracized by all their female friends for breaking the code.

So when a girl tells you, “I just go to dance. I would never hook up with a guy in a club.” Realize that the word dance is a code-word for the “dance” of the mating ritual. After all, the prowess a girl shows on the dance floor is basically sexually exhibitionism — the women who can shake it best get the most attention from guys.

This is why I have such a big problem with couples (boyfriend/girlfriend) going out to nightclubs together to “socialize” or “have fun” or whatever. It makes no sense (anthropologically) for paired off couples to go to a lek for fun, unless they find looking for new mates fun (which, admittedly, lots of people do). Any couple that goes to nightclubs is fooling themselves if they don’t admit they are standing in Hookup Central; and standing in Hookup Central is a pretty direct threat to their relationship (unless the couple is planning to Hookup In Tandem — but that’s a different post).

Now that we’ve agreed on that, let’s move on: why nightclubs?

Benefits and Drawbacks of Nightclub Lekking
If you think about it in a strictly logical way — taking into consideration evolutionary biology, and the lek set-ups that other animals have — nightclubs make no sense.

If the goal is to socialize, get to know someone, have a conversation that shows you their strengths and weaknesses, and evaluate their physical health (and the likely health of their genes) — then a nightclub is just about the worst place to do it. Logically speaking.

Think about it — what are some characteristics nightclubs share in common?

• Loud music: makes it hard to talk, hear, or be understood
• Dim lighting: makes it hard to see anyone, judge their complexion, etc
• Colored lighting: minimizes skin imperfections, makes people look “warmer”
• Alcoholic beverages: impairs judgment, motor coordination (dancing??!)

So, given all the above, why on earth have we as humans decided to built environments for our leks that are so logically horrible for lekking?

It may be a question without a good answer, but I have a theory. I believe that our nightclubs have these characteristics in order to do two things:

1. Level the playing field

and

2. Weed out the timid.

To point #1, in a nightclub, it’s much easier to fake. A woman doesn’t have to as attractive to get play in a nightclub (not only because she has makeup and implants) but because the lights are complimentary to her hair and skin. The harsh light of fluorescents would reveal her for what she truly is — a bad evolutionary choice — but a nightclub allows guys to see her as pretty, even desirable. (The general rule of thumb is that, for any point value assigned on the Hot Babe Rating Scale (0-10) to a girl in a club, subtract 2-3 points for “club effect”).

Point #2 is really the corollary of #1, only for men. Since a woman’s attraction to men is not predicated on their appearance, but on their level of masculine dominance (courage/tenacity/strength of character) it only makes sense to put leks in a confined, loud, dark, often violent place where social status is obvious and a timid (beta) man would fear to tread.

Nightclubs serve as a pre-screen for women: only a relatively courageous, social man will venture into them at all (the socially maladjusted, extremely anxious, fearful or “weird” just stay out of them) and once he gets there, it will be easy to distinguish him from the TRULY alpha, dominant, fun-loving guy.

This is why so many girls who are JUST looking for no-strings attached or ‘fun’ sexual hookups frequent nightclubs — they know that the loser-ish “beta” guys are mostly already weeded out, and all the other levels of status segregate and stratify out in a very easy-to-see way, like layers of silt on a riverbank.

How Nightclubs Separate the Wheat from the Chaff
Clubs are like fishbowls of regular social interaction. I say “fishbowls” because, in a club, typically everyone can see pretty much everyone else; also, typically, everyone is pretty much constantly watching everyone else, for two reasons:

1. Vanity: To see who else is watching them back
2. Social calibration: to see where everyone else falls on the “social status” scale

Of these two motivations, I happen to believe #1 is far more important (especially for women). But do not underestimate the importance of people calculating their social value in relation to everyone else. We all do it, in our every day lives, every time we are in the presence of other people — it is an automatic response, designed to help us calibrate our behavior and interactions so that we manage to extract the maximum value we can from every interaction without pissing other people off.

Nightclubs just make it easier to do, because of the constrained time, space, and physically competitive layout.

Clubs are status environments; everybody in a nightclub lies along a social status continuum, from the highest-status person (the Manager or Owner) to the lowliest scum who no one acknowledges.

Social status is also somewhat transferable in nightclubs; a low-status ugly guy that everyone is shunning might get a temporary boost if a hot girl comes and dances on him for a few minutes. That might give him the courage to go dance with another girl, which might attract another girl to come dance on him too — until another, higher-status guy comes and takes his girls away, totally deflating him.

And so it goes.

Social transactions like these are the bread-and-butter of a typical night at a club. Over the course of a single night, a guy’s status may fluctuate between High, Medium and Low, depending on what he does and what kind of a night he’s having.

Below is a quick list of a typical Nightclub Status Hierarchy; from highest to lowest. Notice that *all* employees precede *all* patrons.

Club Employees
• Club Owner (if present): Highest status.
• Club Manager: Highest by default (unless Owner present).
• Lead security guard (regardless of physical size, although they usually correspond)
• Front door security (”Door guy” / “bouncer”): sometimes same as previous.
• Lead Bartender
• All other security guards
• All other bartenders
• Barbacks (if any)
• Front desk girls (stamp, cashier, coat check)
• Go-go dancers or other entertainers (usually contracted for the night only

Patrons

• VIPs / Regulars (do not pay for drinks or cover; skip line; VIP area access)
• Hottest *legitimately beautiful* girl(s) in the club
• Most sexually exhibisionistic girl(s) in the club (”biggest skanks”)
• Most dominant, alpha, social guy(s) in the club
• Otherwise-unremarkable girls showing lots of skin
• All other women
• All other “regular” guys
• Guys on Death Row

Notes on the Status Hierarchy
Obviously, the Guys in Charge (employees) are high status — and none more so than the Club Manager (Owners rarely, in practice, stop by).

This is, incidentally, why you see so many ugly/short/otherwise low-value guys in positions as Nightclub Managers / Security / Bouncers. If you saw these guys on the street, you’d think they were just random lame ass dudes. But in their night club, they are king.

I had a Manager once, who ran a 20,000+ square foot nightclub that regularly placed in the Top 100 Nightclubs in America, and the guy was literally 5″ tall. Every other guy in the place stood literally at least a FOOT over him, but he was still the highest-status Top Dog in the place. (Usually, short guys have a *lot* of trouble getting girls — that prejudice about height having something to do with penis length, maybe — but this guy, predictably, had no problem in that department).

Door guys are high status, naturally, because they are Gatekeepers, controlling access to the clubs.

Bartenders, male or female, are high status because they control the flow of alcohol.

Hired Guns
Any female who WORKS for the nightclub — even as a door girl, cashier, stamper, coat check, cocktail waitress, or promoter — I call a hired gun, and they all automatically have higher status than any girl that *doesn’t* work at the club, even if the employee is uglier than the patron.

The funny thing about this is, their status increase is totally unrelated to any actual qualities the girls may have.

Whereas an otherwise-low status male who gets a job at a nightclub typically has *some* redeeming personal characteristics — being big and muscular, for example, or a shrewd marketer, or a great manager — women that work at nightclubs I have found to be almost singularly lazy, shiftless, unpleasant to work with, shallow, and narcissistic. Typically their best qualities are physical and therefore they are almost wholly superficial in character.

The job doesn’t help them develop depth of character, either, for two main reasons:

1. Hired guns are basically one step above strippers. They get paid to flirt; the more sexually exhibisionistic they are, the more money they make.
2. Hired guns get hit on ALL the time; simply because they get so much exposure as a function of being REQUIRED to interact constantly with all the drunk assholes

Hired guns are also frequently hypocritical, since they consider themselves much better (in an absolute moral sense) than strippers, but have no qualms about dancing on bar tops in a sexual manner for extra tips (I’ve seen it happen on more than one occasion).

So hired guns develop not only a highly inflated sense of self-worth and value
(as a result of all the drunken assholes hitting on them in compensation for not being able to hit on the girl they wish they had the balls to approach) but also have a highly-developed bitch shield (an attitude of bitchy dismissiveness that they carry around to ward off drunken assholes).

To their credit, some of them DO have standards — one very attractive (and well-endowed) bartender I worked with once got asked by some average douchebags to flash them for $10. Now I, overhearing the conversation, was I sort of offended on her behalf at that low offer — her breasts were worth *much* more than that — but she just said to them, without rancor or anger, “I don’t do that, if I wanted to do that I’d be a stripper.” And then continued pouring their drinks.

Non-Employee Hierarchy and Death Row
As for the non-employee status hierarchy, it’s much less interesting. Pretty much everyone walks into the club with “medium” status, unless they are extremely attractive, very well dressed, or wearing some sort of peackocky clothes (outrageous, etc — think how black people dress in clubs, pimp-style).

Hot girls are high status because, well, all the guys want to fuck ‘em, and any non-employee male that has status probably has it because he is WITH and/or has the attention of the hot girls.

There’s a phenomenon at nightclubs known as “Death Row”. It’s where all the lame guys go to stand and watch girls — they don’t dance themselves, they don’t interact with anyone, they just go sit on the wall / bar with their drinks, watch the girls dance, and get progressively drunker.

It’s called “Death Row” because it’s a given that these guys aren’t going home with any girls tonight (unless they brought one, and sometimes not even then). These guys are spectators — it’s clear they’re heterosexual, and enjoying the floor show put on by scantily-clad, undulating women, but it’s also clear they cannot work up the courage to do anything about what they desire so badly.

And that means that their genes will not be given a chance, that night, to make them immortal. Gene death. Death row.

Any guy who spends any appreciable time on Death Row is, by definition, part of the chaff — guys who go to nightclubs because they’re hoping “something might happen” (like “getting lucky”) but have no skills or knowledge how to move things forward with a woman, especially in a loud, dark, noisy, scary environment like a nightclub. Guys may justify this by saying “All those girls are bitches, I would never hook up with a dirty club skank, they’re all diseased anyway - I just go to watch their tits jiggle” but this is the same excuse as women saying “I just go to dance” — the guys are secretly hoping something will happen, but unable to do anything to get the ball rolling.

You think one of these guys wouldn’t respond well if two of these so-called “club skanks” with short skirts and cleavage a-bouncin’ came up and started grinding on him? Of course he would. He’s not going to push them off and go, “Ewww, dirty club skanks, get out of here.” As in the previous example, the girls dancing on him increase his social status.

And that’s the whole game in clubs. Increasing your social status. Having more status than the next guy. Basically, the entire “game” runs on this linchpin:

Highest-value guy gets the girls

How to actually GET high status in clubs, apart from getting a job there, is an in-depth subject for another post.

For now, I gotta get something off my chest: the confusion of Nightclubs with Bars.

Nightclubs vs Bars & Pubs - And Why it Matters
This is a fine distinction that many people don’t bother to make. When they go out “clubbing”, they go to bars, nightclubs, or nightclubs and bars, and qualify everyone in them as people they “met at a club”.

This is just not true. A nightclub is quite distinct from a bar — because a nightclub is for hooking up in, and a bar can be just used for having a drink — and, furthermore, different *types* of people will got a bar or pub, people who might otherwise never set foot in a nightclub.

In terms of selection, in terms of competition, in terms of pressure and and the rigidity of social status hierarchies, and in terms of what’s expected and how vigilant people are, pubs –> bars –> nightclubs.

That is, all those elements just mentioned get RATCHETED UP as you move from a pub to a bar to a nightclub.

Pubs and bars are lower-pressure. Yes, people do meet and hook up in them, and for that reason you might want to think about frequenting bars and pubs looking for fit birds before you “graduate” to nightclubs. Because of the status issue, nightclubs are a much more long-term project; you have to basically invest your time and energy into a nightclub to get anything out of it. Bars and pubs are “in-n-out” sorts of places and much more geared towards socializing than hooking up. There’s also a lot less sexual exhibitionism in bars and pubs.

This is why girls know that the game is up when they walk into an actual club — every guy that is there is there to get laid (unless he’s brought his girlfriend). Guys, don’t make the excuse that you’re going out to nightclubs “to hang with your boys” — if you really wanted to do that, you’d just go to the local pub and have a pint.

If you’re going to a nightclub with a group of guys, you’re lekking.

Be honest about it, but don’t be crass. Don’t say “We’re gonna go pull ass tonight.” That is looked down on in many social circles (very high-class or upscale LA clubs, for example). Say instead “We’re gonna go socialize.” And then go socialize.

===

Well, this has been quite an article….I knew I’d have a lot of thoughts on nightclubs, having been a part of the industry for so long, but I had no idea it would be this much — and I think there’s enough random information still floating in my head to make another post just as long, with more detail on working nightclubs in particular, to the end of sleeping with beautiful women.

So stay tuned, as always….the best is yet to come.

Related Articles:

• Why Pickup is Such a Big Deal
• Why You Should 'Sarge'
• Social Energy in Seduction
• How to Pull Chicks from Nightclubs
• Top 100 Universal Conversational Openers
• States and Frames Explained
• How to Talk to Complete Strangers Without Anxiety
• Approach Women vs Opening Women