‘We were boys — but nice boys’: the opening words of Young Titans by the great Dutch novelist Nescio, have moved generations of readers by capturing the familiar defeat of the romantic, naïve, introverted and shy teenage boy whose mother has taught him always to respect a girl’s every whim; to be sweet and yielding and understanding – and never to push her in any way.
These nice boys: they are not the exception. All too many fathers do not balance their sons’ rosy images of women – either because they themselves are unpracticed in engaging with women, or because they are simply absent altogether from the home.
Add to this the biological fact that boys usually mature slower than girls and that at sixteen, a girl’s sexual horizon is generally much wider than a boy’s – and you’ll understand that the nice boy’s school years are often lost on wistful dreams of ethereal heavenly creatures, idealizing the girls around him and writing hopeless love letters.
To no avail. Nice boys don’t get laid. In fact, they tend to bring out the very worst in young women. In spite of the popular image of the fairer or weaker sex, it would be difficult to find any creature as merciless as the nymphet. Perhaps an explanation may be found in evolution – that women are looking for vigorous sperm donors in order to safeguard procreation; that the species’ existence depends in some way on such defense mechanisms – who knows. But the fact remains that timidity and restraint in men fulfill young women with revulsion.
So before they even finish school most young men already have a considerable track-record of rejection. Their love letters have been ridiculed in front of them while the self-absorbed girl hopped on the back of some guy’s scooter, clinging her arms around what doesn’t adore or admire her. And after he all-too predictably dumps her, the girl will shed her tears on the shoulders of her girlfriends, who will assure her that ‘she is not to blame’.
Like donna Anna in Mozart’s classic opera, she doesn’t desire the kind-hearted Don Ottavio but rather dreams of the rapturous Don Giovanni; like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, she isn’t attracted to the slightly boring, yet deeply trustworthy Charles but falls hopelessly for Rodolphe. Or Leon. Or whatever the guys’ names are.
The nice boy sees all of this and feels even more diminished. He enters his student years with a chronic lack of self-confidence. All these rejections have only heightened his admiration for women, with the inevitable consequence that they fancy him even less. “And who are you to judge”, our female readers will indignantly remark upon reading this. “Do we not have a right to self-fulfillment and validation? Has all emancipation been futile?”
Such is life – and not just in my country or yours. Not just for the down and out. It’s life for millions of men all around the world. Now, in response they can retire and lick their wounds; they can accept defeat, subscribe to consoling porn sites and wait until the biological clock finally shifts the balance of power in their favour. Or they can move on, seize their lives and conceive for themselves a second – more masculine – nature. In short, they can take a course with Julien Blanc.
Dating coaches like Blanc, have developed a method to reclaim the initiative in relations with women. Through perceptive insights into body language, conversation technique and increased awareness of one’s environment, such coaches can help boost the masculine in their students and facilitate their interaction with women. They can gradually learn to become the big fish of the evening and develop the skills to make women – so used to looking down on them – look up to them. Incredible as it may seem, a number of relatively simple tricks and ‘routines’ can actually help overcome social awkwardness, and girls can be rapidly approached and engaged with.
But yes, you’re right – that’s not all. In order ultimately to be successful, a man also needs to overcome his natural anxiety of the bed-department. He should not enter with the idea: ‘Heavens, what would she think of me…’- but instead he should think: ‘You’re mine!’. If he doesn’t, the woman feels rejected in her womanhood (even if in reality, of course, the opposite is the case). She will feel she is not fully appreciated – let alone celebrated – in what she perceives to be her most vulnerable, most intimate identity, and thus she becomes disinclined to give herself to him. She won’t fall in love but rather she will grow irritated, telling her friends the ‘chemistry’ was off.
‘So stare them straight in the eyes,’ Blanc teaches his students, ‘overcome your fears, don’t hold anything back.’ Self-confidence, spontaneity: focus. And it works! You may find his style unwavering, his jokes vulgar or some of his actions tasteless. You might disagree (like I do too) with some of his statements.
But it is absurd to accuse Blanc of misogyny when women succumb in spades to his methods (and at the same time read en masse the masochistic Fifty Shades of Grey). It is even more absurd to claim that these dating coaches incite sexual violence when the whole point of their courses is to unravel the secrets of attraction and love – things that can’t be forced out of someone, indeed that can only be given out of free will.
But – and here it comes – the truth is that women do not want men merely to adore them, to sit in awe of them and radiate gratitude for their love. They do not want their resistance and hesitations always to be respected. Of course, violence or coercion of any kind are absolutely unacceptable. But women do want to be lead, overwhelmed, overmanned. Julien Blanc is absolutely right in that regard. So my advice to all ‘boys, but nice boys’ is simple: look through the hysterical media hype and just take one of his dating courses. You’ll thrive from it – and so will your future girlfriend. Thank me later.
Thierry Baudet is a Dutch writer, journalist and public intellectual, and the author of, amongst others, Conditional Love, a novel (in Dutch) about the world of professional womanizers and gigolo’s.
