The Reality Method 2.0

The Celebrity Force in Seduction

Social life organizes itself around celebrity just as biological life orders itself around sex.

What is the highest biological type of quality we can achieve? Great sex (and attendant reproduction and immortality).

What is the highest social quality we can achieve? Fame, also known as celebrity.

As a philosophical viewpoint, this may be open to debate, but I think it holds some truth and is a useful frame for the discussion of seduction, and recognizing the importance and power of high social status and value (celebrity) in greasing the wheels of the biological machine.

Why Celebrity Should Matter to YOU
Do you remember in high school, when there was that one group of cool kids that everyone knew were cooler than everyone else in your grade (or the school?) There were maybe 5 or 6 of them (or maybe a full dozen), and plenty of people mimicked them and wished they could be part of that ‘inner circle’, but weren’t?

That is the organizing force of celebrity. It is an exclusionary force. Meaning; its organizational power lies in how it is able to subdivide large groups of people into much smaller groups that can then compete for attention, reflect on each another, feud, ally, treat, truck and betray each other — all while a much larger group of people (the out-group that is NOT famous) feeds on the drama and unraveling storyline.

Look at West Side Story; look at the Bloods versus the Crips and inner-city drug lords; look at Hollywood gossip mags, news programs, and websites; look at the history of the aristocracy, both in this country and in England; it’s all there, all throughout history.

Celebrities are our modern-day aristocracy; we love them, we hate them, we pay ungodly amounts of attention to them, and ultimately we are capable of destroying them utterly.

A Zen saying: “Be careful, if you get too famous, you will go straight to hell.”

Coming back to seduction, you see this same organizing force of celebrity in nightclubs, or concerts, or fashion shows, or political rallies; anytime you put a bunch of people together for any purpose, the organizing force of celebrity is there.

Queen Bees and Wannabes
In high schools, there are usually three main groups of girls (as aptly demonstrated in the docudrama “Mean Girls”): (1) the Alpha girls or Queen Bees, a.k.a “Teen Royalty”, who set the rules of “in” femininity for the school; (2) the Beta girls, wannabes and hangers-on who wish they were part of the Alpha club; and (3) the Gamma girls, who ignore both Alpha and Beta and concentrate on making a difference, are involved with student government, sports councils, and other resume-builders.

Once they leave high school, female populations become much less centralized, and, lacking a strong clique network to support their tyrannical femininity, the former Queen Bees shrink to the size of Betas or Gammas; the rare Alpha female that perseveres into adulthood typically faces mounting difficulty in partnering with each passing year (as I allude to in this post), and furthermore will be scalded by onlookers as “frigid, rigid and controlling”, a strong, empowered woman who chases away men and any hope of reproduction with the very qualities that made her the subject of so many adolescent masturbatory fantasies.

Note: As tempting as it may be to divide men along these lines, I have trouble seeing the third functional category (”gamma”) existing for males. In the female world, typically all three categories have an easy enough time getting laid, if they’re willing to engage a man desperate enough — and the structure of our society dictates there will almost always be a man desperate enough — whereas, Beta males may go years in forced celibacy. And if the main difference between Alphas and Beta males is that Alphas find it easy to get laid, and Betas don’t, why introduce a third category?

Some writers have suggested that Gamma males incorporate the best of both Alpha and Betas, but I think that’s just lazy (and magical) thinking: the characteristics of the Alpha and Beta are, in the main, not combinable.

The A-Crowd Entourage
In nightclubs, there is always an “A-Crowd”; a group of celeb-like people of high status who can roll in, free of charge, ignore everyone, buy obscene amounts of alcohol, and get treated like royalty while everyone else pretends not to be watching them.

It’s the reality TV show of the club; everyone is watching the VIPs go in and out of their lounge, sizing up how pretty their girls are, what they’re drinking, how they are dressed; how good of a time they seem to be having; trying to figure out where the afterparty is. Everyone wants to be “in”. Nightclub owners and managers leverage this desire using VIP cards as prizes, party packs, and exclusive access. They are just peddling status, an illusory and wholly created product that does not exist outside of our imaginations: turn the lights on, or walk into that same swank dance club on a bright Tuesday morning in the middle of summer, and there’s absolutely nothing anyone would want to pay $300 a night for.

Hence the essential function of nightclubs — and why I think so much of black urban / hip-hop culture is club-centric: to manufacture status (and not even real status, but illusory, time-limited status).

You may only dream of being a hip-hop mogul, but even if you’re light-years from a record deal, you can pretend to be 50 Cent or Timbaland, for one night only, for the cost of a new set of rims.

The Celebrity Lifestyle
There is a very good reason that 100’s of thousands of preteen and adolescent girls go crazy over a Ricky Martin or a Justin Timberlake or a Robbie Williams or even a Marilyn Manson: and that reason is celebrity (which is really just another way of saying social proof).

Backstage after the show, do these singers rush up to their fawning fans and greet them, and ask their names? No, they lay back, and let the fawning fans rush up to greet them, and ask for their autographs and gush about how much they love their music and how amazed they are to get to met them.

Famous singers — who are high value and therefore very attractive to women — never have to try to get rapport with anyone. Everyone tries to get rapport with them.

This is a useful frame to keep in mind.

What does a famous singer or celebrity do when they go out in public? They dress down, or drive around in unmarked cars with tinted windows without an entourage. Outside on the street, or even when they go to clubs, they wear dark sunglasses.

What is with the dark sunglasses in clubs? It’s indoors, it’s nighttime; what could possibly be the point of wearing dark sunglasses?

Just this: this practice was started by celebs, and everyone who is not a celeb but has since picked it up is consciously or unconsciously mimicking them, for very specific reasons: dark sunglasses break rapport.

As I’ve written previously, the very first rapport probe anyone gets or gives is eye contact; so if you automatically break all possibilities of eye contact with dark glasses, you are effectively denying rapport to everyone but the very selective group you came with.

Wearing dark sunglasses in an environment where they are unnecessary implies a desire to deny rapport with everyone; these people are all beneath me; none of them deserve to hold eye contact with me, or even try for rapport with me.

Celebs, for the most part, are all about breaking rapport, all the time — if they didn’t, they would be continually overwhelmed by trying to keep up with all their fans.

A certain amount of rapport-breaking is unavoidable in people of significantly high status; they cannot possibly reply to or interact with all the people who want their time; so they end up breaking rapport “by accident”, without really having any control over it, just by nature of the strictures of the 24-hour day and their busy schedules.

The Lessons of Celebrity, Applied
All of the above is exactly why seduction experts teach their students to “break rapport” by “negging”, not turning their bodies towards women too soon, taking care to not appear to interested or attracted too early, etc etc etc.

It’s also why I have suggested that you shouldn’t worry if women find discarded condom wrappers in your trash, or pictures of you and other women — because all of this, up to and including wearing dumb dark sunglasses at night, indoors — are markers for the high-status male, that is, the celebrity.

A lot of male celebrities are good looking, but some of them are totally unremarkable (Vince Vaughn, Edward Norton, and Kevin Spacey, for starters) yet still wield enormous sexual power. Why? Implicit social proof and universal approval: the farcical and completely illusory epiphenomena that women can’t help but respond to, even though it flies in the face of logic: 50,000 women like him, therefore he MUST be roughly 50,000 more desirable than a guy only one woman likes.

So, if the raw sexuality of male star power is largely illusory, then why not create some of that magic fame and celebrity pixie dust for yourself?

That is, in fact, exactly what I am advocating.

Women are drawn to — and attracted by — pack leaders, leaders of men and other women. Some of the smartest pickup and seduction artists have leveraged this social force to their own advantage in very obvious ways: to wit, media coverage.

You’d think that progressively more media exposure of a seduction expert would throw off his “game”, blowing his “cover”. This is not the case. To the contrary, it doesn’t matter if a girl recognizes these guys, “Oh hey, you’re that famous seduction guy, aren’t you? World’s best pickup-artist? Yeah, I saw you on Playboy TV.” Or “Weren’t you on Conan O’Brien?” Or “Don’t men pay you thousands of dollars to teach them how to be good with women?”

Don’t think about those statements logically: rather, analyze them from the point of view of a woman (if you can). Put yourself in her evolutionary shoes.

“This guy….is so good with women….that….other guys…PAY HIM….”

Slam dunk, game over. Leader of Men has been identified and hook-up plans for the night have been solidified. Even if her conscious mind is saying, “Bullshit, you can’t be ‘good’ with women, it’s just natural, it’s all chemistry, I don’t fall for stupid lines, I’m too smart for that”, her unconscious mind has already made the decision.

This is why a lot of guys chase fame or success in whatever their hustle is, because they really just want the status that they can parlay into reproductive success. They’ve taken to heart what 50 Cent says: “Homie, you hustlin’ backwards if you chasin’ a bitch / Stupid, chase the paper, they come with the shit”

Of course, not a very nuanced perspective from my man Curtis, but the point is that you can create an aura of success and leadership — the cosmetic markers of Celebrity status — without having to achieve 50’s level of success.

If wannabe-rappers in nightclubs and adolescent girls in class can do it, so can you.