On Silverback Gorillas, Men & Dating

Sometimes I wish Substack existed when I was in my 20s.

So, today I read a great piece on Substack by a guy named Brangus. It had the kind of rage-bait-y title that draws me in, and I prepared myself accordingly to cringe/be annoyed. This is because when I was still dating in my 20s, I read a lot of human sexuality and evo-psych books, and an unhealthy amount of pick-up artist (PUA) “content”—not because I wanted to learn how to be a PUA, but but because I wanted to learn how to quickly identify and defend against the PUA script that gets sold to desperate, horny dudes.¹ In another life, I would have been an excellent professor of human sexuality.²

This is actually a much smaller collection compared to what I had when I was living in the States. Needless to say, most of the guys I was dating realized very quickly that I was on to their methods, and that it was best not to trifle with silly games.

“Oh god, this is going to be another pick-up artist post spewing bullshit,” I thought to myself.

As a preface, if you’ve managed to go your entire life blissfully unaware of ‘the manosphere,’ or r/redpill, or the PUA oeuvre, firstly, let me say, bravo. Still, if you’re curious, but don’t want to wade into that cesspit, here’s a short primer covering basic themes:³

1. Negging: Negging is basically a nicer way to say ‘being a dick to women’. Guys are taught techniques to identify and target a woman’s insecurities in order to manipulate them into sex. Most guys are very, very bad at negging, and then are surprised when it doesn’t work out for them.

2. Peacocking: AKA, dress like a dandy and/or a pimp—bright colors, statement clothing, something eye-catching, or gaudy even. This can be done well, but often it isn’t. Peacocking is one of the less offensive PUA techniques, because it’s mostly harmless.

3. Viewing relationships/women as transactional: At its core, PUA culture is about treating women—and relationships—as transactional. It’s all about ‘body count’ and discarding women after you get what you want (or they stop being attractive, get old, or you find something better).

4. Demonstrating higher-value: This is mostly signaling—showing off flashy cars, bragging about your high-paying salary, houses, assets, or showing that you’re highly prized on the dating market, etc.

5. The “Mystery Method”: There’s a lot of involved process here, which I don’t want to get into, but essentially, this is a combination of 1-3, coupled with rapport building & seduction.

6. Kino escalation: Gradually escalating the amount of touch and engagement. Some techniques are pretty standard-fare rapport building, but others call for aggressive physical boundary invasion.

7. Push and pull: The goal here is to convince the woman you’re both interested and not, through a combination of negging, praise, love-bombing, ghosting and then re-appearing again, setting false time-constraints, etc. The name of the game is to be inscrutable and to permanently keep your potential conquest off-guard.

Anyway, I say all of this to give you a window into my expectations. They were low. Here’s the article:

Brangus's 10 Rules for Sleeping with Women

But I’m here to say that Brangus was not writing PUA slop. On the contrary, his advice was the kind of sage, high-value stuff that if it had existed in the early and mid 2000s, I would have happily shared with all my struggling and horny guy friends. The good guys who wanted to be successful, find love, and just weren’t equipped with the right toolkit. To think, an entire generation of guys could have been saved from PUA bullshit, if this post had existed then!

In many respects, this post is the masculine corollary to J. Sanilac’s excellent critique on the myths of feminine beauty. I wrote about it here.

Questions You Can't Answer Without Everybody Losing

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All ten rules are spot-on, but I wanted to particularly highlight Rules 4 & 5, which is possibly the best analogy I’ve ever read for explaining why rejecting men is so precarious for women which in turn makes hitting on women deeply unpleasant for men. He properly credited the brilliant analogy to his friend, which is A++ human-ing, btw.

Rule 4: Have a decent model of what it’s like being a straight woman dealing with men’s sexuality

…

Imagine that the human species is quite different. In your world, there are no human women, but there are still basically two human sexes. There are human males like yourself, and then silverback gorillas. Now, all of the silverback gorillas really want to fuck you. They are all much stronger than you and could easily kill or permanently injure you if they wanted to. And you barely find any of them attractive. Their impulse control varies, but probably at least a few of them have sexually harassed you at some point. You know that many of them are nice and willing to protect you and give you resources in various situations, expecting little in return, but again, you aren’t that into many of them, if any.

You have been rejecting gorillas your whole adult life. Sometimes they get angry at you, sometimes they cry, sometimes they stop being your friend, sometimes they decide not to hire you or tell others not to hire you. Now imagine that you are on a bus home after a long day of work, wearing your headphones, and one of these fucking gorillas sits next to you and keeps trying to get your attention even though you’re wearing headphones. How do you think you’d react?

This metaphor has been invaluable to me. You should always ask yourself: If I were me in this gorilla world, how would I want a gorilla to approach me? In what way could they approach me that wouldn’t make me wish I had stayed in today?

Emphasis is mine. But he didn’t just stop with the silverback-gorilla-as-metaphor—he used it as an introspection tool for men. In Rule 5: Lose the shame over being a gorilla, he acknowledges that hitting on women can, and sometimes will, make some women uncomfortable. This just is. But that doesn’t mean men shouldn’t hit on women, or that women don’t want to be hit on. Most of us actually like a well-executed bit of flirtation!⁴ Rather, it’s about acknowledging one’s inner gorilla and doing better:

I suspect some men will feel some shame having read the previous metaphor. “Oh damn, I am a dangerous pushy gorilla that nobody is into.” Uhh, yep, sorry bud. Best to swallow that pill here and now. …

If you follow my advice, you will at some point make some woman uncomfortable. That’s unfortunate, and to be avoided and minimized, but it’s a cost you are going to have to live with.

When you eventually do, listen carefully to any feedback they might be willing to give you and make it as easy as possible for them to give you that feedback. Learn from the experience and try to minimize the chances and costliness of similar future fuckups but accept now that it is going to happen sometimes.

Imagine that you were her, and you were a gorilla: would you endorse a gorilla escalating in the way that you are about to, given your expectations about the costliness of her rejecting you and the expected benefits of finding that you are both into each other? If not, either figure out some way to change the tradeoffs, or skip this one for now and come back to it if circumstances change.

I love this framing, because ultimately, this is reminding men to be empathetic in a way that is visceral (silverback gorillas are huge and intimidating by virtue of being silverback gorillas, and this can’t be helped), but still encouraging. It’s not don’t hit on women, but it’s also not treat women like transactional, disposable sperm receptacles.

Rather, its just remember you’re a big, hairy silverback gorilla, and move about in the world accordingly. Simple. Elegant. Actionable. I’m pretty sure that more guys will get laid from these ten tips than from anything they read on r/redpill or from listening to fucking Andrew Tate.

Anyhow, just wanted to share, in case you are, or know of a guy who struggles with love. Everybody deserves companionship if they want it, and I think there’d be a lot less loneliness if guys remembered they were silverback gorillas more often.

1. This made me great as a cockblock. I’d watch a guy sidle up to one of my hotter, but more naive friends, try out one or more of these techniques on her, and then I’d describe in vivid detail not only what he was doing, but how badly he executed. I was David Attenborough, in da club.

2. If you’ve read earlier posts, I’ve talked about my dating escapades here and I think in a post I later removed for some reason. Eh.

3. Yes, there’s loads more. No I’m not going to list them all. The internet exists.

4. Even us older, married broads who according to the manosphere have no ‘sexual market value’, still enjoy a properly executed flirt. Most people like feeling desired. Where things spiral and become uncomfortable, is when the flirter doesn’t take no for an answer, internalizes it as a character flaw, or responds in a way that escalates the situation negatively (e.g., by whining/pleading, insulting, or getting physically aggressive). That sucks.