I passed, I saw, I seduced

According to Sergei Agarkov, there are no high-quality pick-up courses in Russia

"Girl, can I meet you?" - this phrase, used by many generations of men devoid of imagination, has long become boring and so banal that most girls do not evoke any response enthusiasm. And all over the world there have long been specialized schools and courses teaching the technology of dating the opposite sex. A couple of years ago, a similar project appeared in Russia, where it received the catchy name “Russian Model of Effective Seduction” (RMES).

How much is a pig in a poke
Have you, men, thought that when you approach a girl on the street or a disco for a specific purpose, you are engaged in ordinary pick-up (from the English verb to pick up - pick up a girl for the night)? Of course, moralists may be outraged by the very term “remove,” but, to be honest, the vast majority of males, usually between 15 and 35 years of age, go through this period of trial and error. Normal girls, by the way, get involved, supporting this eternal game of genders.
However, psychologists know: ease of communication with the opposite sex is not available to all men. If a person is shy and complex by nature, for him not only starting a casual conversation with an unfamiliar girl he likes, but even approaching her in a club that seems to be created for dating, asking her to dance (not to mention more) is a real and often almost insoluble problem. It is for such people that “Dating” columns are published in newspapers, specialized magazines are published, matchmakers work, whose “pig in a poke” often turns out to be not at all what they dreamed of.

Market Potency

Photo: DMITRY LEBEDEV, Kommersant

Pick-up artists easily demonstrate a variety of street dating techniques, but things don’t always go further than this

According to the famous psychologist Vladimir Shakhidzhanyan, according to statistics, up to 20% of young people have problems communicating with the opposite sex. And if we at least roughly estimate the male population of Moscow of the most sexually preoccupied age (20-35 years), discarding 5% of people of non-traditional sexual orientation and the remaining 80% of self-confident machos, the potential of the market for seduction courses will turn out to be very wide - just over 200 thousand. shower. Of course, not all of these thousands will decide to come to such classes (most likely, again due to complexes), but those who have decided are quite enough for a successful business.
“Similar schools have been operating all over the world for a long time and quite successfully, and, of course, this service is in good demand,” says the famous sex therapist Sergei Agarkov.
The cost of such psychological trainings all over the world is quite high. In America, classes cost up to $4 thousand per weekend, and the most famous NLP trainers (neurolinguistic programming, which arose as a result of the work of various psychologists who worked with different methods with equally successful results, based on whose work a model was created that allows identifying the criteria for successful people in any areas, transferring them to others) give lectures, charging at least $500 per student for them, while up to several hundred students can attend the course. In RMES prices are significantly lower.
The standard training version consists of nine steps, each of which lasts one week. After the third and sixth stages there are breaks of two months each, that is, the entire training lasts about six months. Each level costs €70, that is, for the entire course you will have to fork out €630 or €500 if you pay for all the levels at once.
The essence of these trainings is that they improve your communication skills; it becomes much easier for you to communicate with other people, or rather even manipulate them.
Mikhail Pelekhaty, rector of the only NLP institute in Russia, recognized by the founder of NLP Richard Bandler: This is a purely Russian approach, I have not encountered such things anywhere in the world. Yes, there are dating schools, but seduction training is a purely Russian invention.

Seduction according to science

Photo: DMITRY LEBEDEV, Kommersant

The first website lover.ru on the theory of seduction was opened by Philip Bogachev, the founder of RMES, a professional psychologist who has completed dozens of trainings in trance and hypnosis, back in 1998. The site has become quite popular. Before that, Bogachev tried himself in various fields, even selling CDs at Gorbushka, and, as he admits, his talent for passing off s... as candy appeared even then.
Philip Bogachev: My favorite joke in those days was this. Most sellers, when asked by a potential buyer to the standard question “What are you interested in?” answered: “Nothing,” - they sent him to hell. I had prepared a thing called “Nothing” - a transparent CD in a transparent box. And I managed to sell at least several of these “Nothings” every day for 50 rubles. a piece. One day, my site was noticed by a serious person, the owner of a popular dating site, who offered to conduct a live seduction seminar. True, the project failed, but I decided not to give up and did everything myself. The first open seminar took place on May 25, 2002. In those days, Russian pick-up artists still huddled in fidosh sites, and little was heard about them at all. As Bogachev himself admits, almost no material investments were required in the project. People came, having accidentally stumbled upon the site online. The average salary of a trainer at the courses is $150 per day, which is significantly less than at corporate trainings (about $1 thousand), which Bogachev also deals with.
It is not easy to describe what is taught in RMES classes. You need to see this, and even better – participate. The main principle of the school: minimum theory, maximum practice. The locations of the latter are selected according to the principle of “the most crowded and party spots in the capital” - Manezhka, VDNKh, Tverskaya. For theory, RMES rents rooms in various hotels. Each group consists of approximately 50 people, and classes begin when enrollment is completed. In practice, the guys receive instructions and go outside. One of the first tasks, for example, is to approach a hundred girls on the street and say “Hello!” to them, causing some kind of reaction. It’s best to walk around with a notebook and ask each girl who answered hello to sign it - for proof. Gradually the tasks become more difficult. In order not to be embarrassed by others in future acquaintances, students are invited to sing 10 songs in the Moscow metro.

Photo: DMITRY LEBEDEV, Kommersant

Philip Bogachev: You can be fat, or you can be massive, you can be thin, or you can be skinny. The main thing is not what you look like, but how you want to look and how you want to be perceived. This is of paramount importance when communicating with girls.
From the very beginning, the entire training is aimed at making the young man feel more confident and able to “raise his rank” in communicating with girls.
Mikhail, one of the training participants: When I took part in RMES, one of the tasks, for example, was for a girl to send you three letters. Didn't say "Get lost!" or “I don’t want to meet with you,” namely, she sent, sharply and cruelly. Achieving this turned out to be difficult. For example, I told one of the girls I met: “Either you send me to... or tonight we have sex.” To which I heard: “Well, I usually don’t send...”
As you know, the main bugbear for young people when communicating with girls is the fear of rejection, and, according to Bogachev, such an exercise allows you to get rid of these complexes.
Now RMES consists of more than 20 trainers throughout the country, who have trained a little more than a thousand students in Russia, Israel, and Germany over the entire period.
Philip Bogachev: There are five stages of seducing a woman - find, meet, attract, get close, fuck. The first (getting to know each other) is the most difficult, and the main thing is to learn how to establish communication. After each step comes a period of reflection and practice. After all, a person changes a lot and, if you put pressure on him, he can simply break, so he needs to be given time to think about it.
At the first three stages of the training, young people learn to simply approach girls - not at all to communicate. The main principle when meeting people is to turn off your brain, that is, not to think about what and how you say, and just talk (often it doesn’t matter about what), and behave naturally. As the experience of pick-up artists shows, under no circumstances should you start a conversation with girls with banal phrases like “Do you want to meet me?” or "What's your name?"
Yaroslav, pick-up artist: Any beautiful girl is offered to meet a hundred times a day, so she doesn’t want to hear it at all. To stand out and interest a girl, it is more effective to simply say “Hello!”, praise some detail of her clothing, part of her body. Just don't lie about it.

According to Philip, the most effective phrases are those that break the usual patterns of communication. For example, you come up and say: “Cool dress! My six-year-old sister wore this to kindergarten,” or “You are so slim. Probably a former model?”, or “Do you want me not to tell you what time it is?”
Mikhail Pelekhaty: In the language of psychologists, this is called trance induction. The girl finds herself slightly confused for a few seconds, so it is much easier to agree to, for example, give her a phone number or say her name than if she were simply offered to meet.
When acquaintance occurs automatically or the fear of the first approach disappears, the second and then the third steps begin. You don’t just need to get acquainted, you also need to make her like you, make her choose you from all the contenders for the role of the guy she’s ready to date, and then the one with whom she wants to make love. To pass such a selection, you need a lot. For example, do not be boring in communication; give the correct answers to tricky questions so as not to fall for the tricks that most girls arrange for any guy, testing him for “professional suitability.” Here all available methods are used (including hypnosis and induction into trance). The phrase “Let’s remain friends with you” is one of the options for the fact that the guy did not pass the test. This means that he did not complete the task, that is, he did not seduce the girl.
Mikhail, pick-up artist: I almost never date the girls I meet, and if I do meet, I don’t bring them to bed. I have a loved one, whom we have been dating for more than three years, and I have never cheated on her. I enjoy just talking to a lot of girls in a short time.
Grigory, pick-up artist: Once the guys and I staged a small competition to see who could prove to be the greatest seducer in half an hour. We came up with a rating system: for approaching and communicating with a girl - one point, for a kiss - three; if a guy touches a girl and she doesn’t resist, two points. An inspector was assigned. The winner scored almost one hundred points.
Many successful pickup artists even conduct their own master classes. For example, Alexander, the owner of the site fastseduction.ru, for a small fee (a few USD) can help any young man gain confidence in communicating with girls without any theories at all. “I’m just showing that you can meet a girl in any situation,” he says. “For example, I approach my daughter, who is walking with her parents, and ask them if I can meet their charming child. Oddly enough, they give me a phone number and sometimes they even invite me to visit. Or, for example, I immediately get acquainted with a group of girls - there may be two, three, four or more - and then I take the phone from one of them. Once I met a girl who was walking with me. five grandmothers, these were her relatives."
At one of the last stages of the seminar, young people are generally invited to dress in clothes that look more like rags, and in this form meet girls for several hours in a row. Or, for example, get acquainted by playing the roles of other people: a “nerd” student, a millionaire or a “brother” throwing money left and right.

Cost of failure
However, some experts are wary of such practices. Vyacheslav Lyubimov, practicing psychologist at the Institute of Biology and Human Psychology (St. Petersburg): If a young man is really very complex, such exercises are unlikely to help him. "Hello!" He will say it easily, but it will be more difficult to move forward. He simply will not complete tasks, and will lie at seminars about his achievements. Such trainings are more likely for those who have never had any difficulties communicating with girls before. Now it takes on a more lively, playful character for them, becoming a kind of joke, in many cases replacing all other hobbies. Pickup is a temporary phenomenon of liberated young people, similar to rollerblading or the hobby of skateboarding. These people are more likely interested not in the result, but in the process of seduction itself. If the main thing for a person is to collect as many ticks as possible on his track record, then he is more likely not a pick-up artist, but a psycho.
Mikhail Pelekhaty: Such trainings are a good brand, but, in fact, they are harmful both for those who study at them and for those girls whom they meet in this way. The young people who went through them resemble half-educated wizards. They know 5% of how to induce a trance, having memorized just a few standard phrases and a few psychological techniques, and begin to compensate with this for their masculine inadequacy, because they cannot meet a girl in any other way. Essentially, psychological rape occurs. The girl does not feel that she is being manipulated, but on a subconscious level her psyche changes dramatically, and this can come back to haunt her even after a few years. For example, after communicating with a pick-up artist, a young person may have difficulty communicating with young people or become depressed. In psychology, there are many cases where, during an adrenaline surge, people were inspired with phrases that they could not forget all their lives. Personally, for example, I once encountered a patient who could not say “no” to any man. It turned out that as a child she was raised very strictly, and when she once objected to her mother, she hit her on the cheek, so hard that the girl got her hand into the hot tea. There was a double burst of emotion, during which the mother said: “Never dare to say no!”
Sergey Agarkov: In fact, a person’s whole life is a school of learning seduction and flirting, and if you haven’t learned this, you are a complete fool. Such courses will always exploit the deficit of psychological qualities of people of a certain category; this happens all over the world. The whole question is the correctness of the psychological teaching methodology, but I don’t know of any high-quality courses in Russia yet. It is possible that not entirely normal and adequate people may sign up for such classes, so almost everything is acceptable within the group. But when third parties (girls) are involved in the practice and begin to pester them on the street, basic human rights are violated. In the West, such actions would easily be classified as sexual harassment.
As experts note, unfortunately, very rarely people think about the environmental friendliness of using NLP or hypnosis techniques. Many psychotherapists, for example, try to stop their practice if some serious problems arise in their personal lives. This is done because otherwise they will begin to shift their problems onto the patients. Young people taking seduction courses, according to Mikhail Pelekhaty, do the same thing, sometimes destroying the psyche of several dozen girls.
However, Philip Bogachev does not agree with this formulation of the question: If I considered issues of morality, then my training would turn into a theological school. People influence each other from birth, and the acquisition of some special manipulative techniques does not change the situation much. My task is to teach how to seduce women, and then each student chooses which path he will follow: whether he will become a Casanova for the rest of his life or find himself a wife through a pickup truck, with whom he will live for the rest of his life.
DMITRY TIKHOMIROV, YURI MOSKAEV

Magazine "Kommersant Money" No. 22 dated 06/07/2004, page 34

Authors:

Dmitry Tikhomirov