On the the redpill subreddit, I participated in the following thread of conversation:
user Super Awesomeness:
night clubs are specifically set up to make women feel special and men feel intimidated.
And never buy a girl a drink (except maybe as a reward for sucking your dick in the bathroom). Never, ever. And if she asks you to buy her a drink, laugh in her face.
user cagepepper:
Go to the bar, order a glass of water, give to girl. Walk away.
Okay, stop. If you’re a dude, think about how you’d feel doing this. The only way I can imagine doing it congruently is if I were pissed. Otherwise, I’d have a voice in my head the entire way thinking, “This is retarded,” — but I might still do it, especially if I didn’t know what else to do, but had to do something that wasn’t buying her the drink.
And if you think that—“I don’t know what to do, and I need to do something!” then you are already lost. Game, set, match. So much of game is not doing the right thing, but being in a place where you don’t need to do anything—at least not consciously.
The original poseter, user SuperAwesomeness, to give credit where it’s due, quickly corrected the child comment:
even that is partially playing into her demands. I take back what I said about laughing in her face. Just ignore. It’s a shit test.
I’ve seen Brad P. (the pua instructor) at a night club turn things around so that the girl was buying him drinks (and he doesn’t drink – he gave the drinks to me 😀 )
At this point our hero Dropit swooped in to provide a more concrete picture of what this might look like, in reply to SuperAwesomeness:
“What? No!” (wrinkle nose with slight smirk, subcommunicating “Don’t be ridiculous, what is your problem?”) and then (most important part) move on in conversation: “Anyway…”
I’m not entirely happy with the word “smirk,” but the feeling you want to communicate is: “*psst*—the social rules of the venue/situation dictate that your request for me to buy you a drink was, by the rules of the venue/situation, wrong.”
In addition, I can think of three ways you can respond to that. The portions in quotes are thought, not spoken, and they are followed by the actions that express them:
- “You’re immature and entitled.” — slightly exasperated look on your face, roll eyes. For you striver PUA’s out there, you should not fake this until you make it, because it will presumably arise naturally if you meet some girl who is actually acting entitled, and because girls are blue pill too, and may be legitimately trying to flirt with you by asking you to buy her a drink—even if you buying it would damp her attraction to you, she likely doesn’t know that.
- “Ha, good one,” meant without malice. She wouldn’t be so socially unaware as to inappropriately ask for a drink, so she must be joking! Imagine a kind 22-yr-old man who is keeping a 60-yr-old secretary company at a (lame) company party (I uh, may be speaking from past experience). In a spirit of mock flirtatiousness, she asks, “Oh, so will you buy me a drink now?” The correct response (“correct” in this case meaning “barely socially competent”) is to laugh and smile agreeably, not to mock and deride—
- “Oh, shoot, you don’t know?” Pretend you’re in a large group talking, and your best friend says something embarrassing—maybe a cancer joke when the host’s father is deathly ill with cancer—and worse, your friend doesn’t realize it. How do you react? You act embarrassed for them. You might even try and cover for them.
- (My personal favorite) Any combination of the above. “What, no!” (wrinkle nose and laugh at the ridiculousness of the idea, look at her half-smiling with a quizzical, slightly worried look on your face as wonder if maybe rather than joking she’s entitled or clueless, then get past the joke/steer back on track/save her from herself by moving on in conversation. All of this happens very fast.)
But no item on that four-part list is the important part. The important thing is what ties them together—the assumption that, “No, it would be ridiculous for me to buy you a drink.”
And if you have that set in your head, then you will not commit the sin referred to as “making a big deal about it.”
When does someone make a big deal about something? Usually, when things aren’t going their way. The squeaky wheel gets the grease; the wheel is squeaky because it has no grease. It’s harder to change things than it is to let them stay as they are; it’s easier to not buy a girl a drink when that’s the normal state of affairs, than it is when that’s “the norm” in your mind.
LDS story: So, I’m Mormon. And what makes this whole post kind of funny is that, well, I don’t drink. At all. Like, ever in my life, except by accident at a friend’s birthday party when I was 11.
So when I read pickup/redpill advice to the effect of, “Don’t sarge drunk,” it always feels slightly vindicating for me, because, well, Mormon.
What’s interesting to me, though, is reading guys’ thought processes as they consider it. “What do I say about why I’m not drinking?”
You know what I say? “No, thanks though.” End of story. This is not because I have a reason they think is good. If someone really knew my reasons, (“I believe God appeared to a boy in 1820 and gave us additional scripture, and that God later told us through that same guy that we shouldn’t drink,”), then they’d think my reason sucked. Doesn’t matter though—it’s my *commitment* to it that stops people from giving me grief, not that they agree with me.
This post is not about drinking. It’s about the power of being secure in your frame—secure to the point that you don’t need to make a big deal about anything.
Calculated Bravery 