I happened upon a YouTube video by one DeAnna Lorraine, a self-styled dating coach giving men pathetically blue-pilled romance advice. It was titled, “Mens [sic] Attraction Tips: 5 Tests that Hot Women Give You!”

She opens with a breathless statement about how “beautiful, high-quality women are very volatile, and have a very difficult screening process” and promises to tell us about them so we can “spot them and pass them.” She continually refers to a whiteboard that is both off-camera and not written to at any point in the entire video.

First comes the “true confidence test.” You see, hot women are used to confident men wanting to date them, but lots of guys fake being confident and then become needy and clingy, so a woman needs to test for weaknesses in your confidence.

Her discussion of the test? “Remain 100% confident every time you see her.”

OK…where is the TEST? A test is a behavioral syllogism, a functional statement that “she exhibits behavior X, and she’s evaluating you on response Y or Z.”

What she is describing here is a quality, not behavior – a trait rather than a test. I should have stopped watching, but a turkey shoot was in the offing.

Next is the “assertiveness test.” Word is that hot women really don’t want a guy who is a “pleaser” or “agreeable” or who arranges his schedule or preferences around hers. The hamster speaks with a forked tongue when Lorraine says “we might want that for a hookup but not as a husband or a boyfriend.” Yeah, because the guys that girls are going home with for one-nighters are the whiny simps who can talk a good beta-game into their pants.

“Make sure you’re 100% assertive – be masculine, be the leader, and stand your ground.” This video was made in 2010, so her use of the term “stand your ground” is only unintentionally funny.

This is the same shit as “confidence” above. I thought she was going to separate them in the vein of confidence is a vibe, assertiveness is a behavior, but I was mistaken. She awkwardly tries to borrow from the PUAs by asserting “men are the alphas, women are the betas” which sounds even sillier than it reads.

Number three in the tests is the “neediness/clinginess test.” Wait, I thought she said neediness/clinginess was part of the confidence test? Whatever, she’s on a roll.

I’m impressed by her brazen admission that women are intentionally playing “mind games,” flaking and “disrespecting you” to ascertain whether a man has a full schedule. If he is too accommodating to her schedule, he’s “needy” and not enough of a racounteur with am active social calendar and thus isn’t deserving of her.

She drops a classic Freudian slip wen advising men to not put up with a woman’s (again, intentional) disrespect: “Don’t put up with our shit. If we’re late for a date, or if we’re flaky or wishy-washy, stand your ground. And say sorry, I can’t meet with you this week I guess, because you just flaked and I’ve got other plans, I’ve got people to do [grins], uh, people to see, places to go…”

Sounds like some preselection is going on in her mind there, she’s assuming any guy with the balls to shrug at a flaker must have other irons in the fire.

So at least she gave us one test – one in which you are supposed to assume that she is bargaining in bad faith and punish her for it (or at least react with nonplussed nonchalance).

The comments are hilariously critical, another comment thread suggesting that more and more men are simply checking out of the “what women want from men today” discussion entirely, and are not shy about going public to say so.

ADVICE TO “JUST BE _____” IS NOT ADVICE

When I was in college a friend had a poster of Tiger Woods giving golf tips. The tips were self-satiric; one of them said “try to hit the ball at least 300 yards.”

This video recalls the same sense of “yeah, thanks for nothing.” This isn’t even bad advice – it’s not advice. There’s nothing actionable in here that a guy can commit to doing that will improve his dating results. It’s simply an appeal to an aura, to a sense of “this is the kind of FEELING we want a guy to give us deep down.”

The “call to characteristic” is a frequent marker of female dating writers, and is as ineffective as it is predictable. I’m not sure if the women giving this kind of advice are just trolling the guys because they don’t want to get serious with their criticisms of men and what really turns them on, or if they honestly don’t understand that a dude can’t just get out of bed and say “I’m going to be more confident today. I’m going to be less needy today.”

It’s like waking up and saying “I’m going to bench 50 more pounds today.” How ridiculous does that sound? Personality traits cannot be switched on overnight like a new pair of socks. Behavaiors CAN be changed quickly, it’s just a matter of doing it the right way and then doing it enough to make it a habit. That was the genius of the original PUA/seduction gurus, and the open secret of the most successful modern game writers – they break down good game into behaviors that can be learned, practiced and habituated. Whether those behaviors are walking tall, approaching, or going to the gym, they become habits that become your future.

BAD FRAME, BAD GAME

Why would any man take social advice from this woman? Her public speaking skills are shitty.

She keeps grinning at her own phrases like “look at me, I’m on camera!!!”She stutters and trips over her words, when it’s a damn YouTube video you can film again and again. Or you could go dual-shot (maybe using some actual visual aids), giving you the freedom to splice together different takes for the best final quality. I don’t even work in the A/V industry and I know how to make this 100% better. I feel like I’m at a Toastmasters meeting with noobs. (For those who don’t know, Toastmasters is a public-speaking skills organization that operates small clubs where people meet to practice and drill communications skills. I was in the club at one of my old jobs. TM can teach some really good core skills in the context of a sympathetic support group, but from what I’ve seen tends to top out at the start of intermediate public speaking. I certainly don’t criticize anybody who is trying to improve but your basic TMer is not ready to make YouTube videos purporting expertise in romantic social skills.)

Another credibility gap in the discussion her constant bleating of the phrase “beautiful, high-quality women.” (Also her use of the first-person “we” to presumptively include herself in that group.) The fact is that lots of beautiful women can be and are very low-quality women. Quality is not sexual market value, it is relationship value.

For me at least, the idea of a “quality woman” is one that has some sense of character going on, NOT one who is really hot. That means someone who cares about your comfort and pleasure, who’s going to build some kind of a mutual life with you, the woman who’s holding your hand as you’re wheeled into surgery – not strategizing about how to employ the best subterfuge in smoking out your true frame and cackling about how many other guys she has on order. It’s not that a quality woman won’t fitness test you or will stick around no matter what, but she’s not going to be on such a hair trigger that a failed test (not “being 100% confident”) is going to be the end of things. Her traits are those that fundamentally trend the relationship towards keeping together and not breaking apart. Someone who is only committed when the water is still and the trail is clear is not committed.

I have to say it’s very interesting to read the Jezebel-type pieces that insist a woman’s physical shape has nothing to do with her value as a person or a prospective partner, and then hear this woman reflexively equate genetic gifts with quality and what kind of man she “needs” and deserves.

An aside: for women reading this, you can take heart – if you’re a quality woman involved with a man who’s looking for a quality woman, you do not have to be the most beautiful woman he can get. You don’t even have to be beautiful, per se. (What you have to do is pass his boner test. As a caveat, this is true of a man who is in the relationship market in some way or another. If he’s in the casual dating market, he’s optimizing on some combination of the hottest and easiest girls he can get.)

LISTEN FOR WHAT IS BEING COMMUNICATED

Having pointed out all this ridiculousness, I’d be remiss not to note that there is plenty men can learn from this video. The rhetoric and the logic are terrible, but once you strip those away, she’s actually communicating some very good signal.

Her tips boil down to:

• Be confident
• Be assertive
• Don’t be needy or clingy

Her tone is the unactionable and content-free “how to be a hot guy: just BE hot, in these 3 different ways.” But her material is textbook PUA game.

However, you need to listen even deeper and pick up the truths of frame she asserts:

• Attractive women want men to be irrationally self-confident
• Attractive women want men to overrule them and to pay little heed to their stated opinions and desires
• Attractive women employ flakiness and intentional disrespect as fitness tests; the responses they want to see emulate the behaviors of a plate-spinning player

I didn’t write it, that’s exactly what she is saying.

Allow me to translate into instructional phrasing more familiar with the Manosphere.

• Frame is everything, never give up your frame
• Be irrationally self-confident
• Pass fitness tests
• Don’t be beta (don’t be deferential, don’t fawn, don’t accommodate her bad behavior)

When you know what to listen for, her words are very clear. It’s just not the signal she expects us to hear. She’s not training boyfriend-type men to be more attractive in that role; she’s training them to turn away from the boyfriend-type role entirely, and embrace the player-type role that she and her compatriots desperately crave. To whatever degree DeAnna and women like her actually want to have relationships, the joke is ultimately on them.

Women like this videographess aren’t testing men for commitment traits – his loyalty, dependability, good decision-making, long-term orientation, sense of fairness and balance, and desire to maintain a relationship. They are testing for how much does he exhibit – or at least emulate – the relationship-averse traits of the elusive and noncommittal alpha male they tingle for.