Johnny Wolf\'s PUA Blog

One of my old friends back in socal linked me to an article written by some guy on the RSD forums about why Bartenders in Thailand get laid:

What Bar Tenders in Thailand Taught Me About The Game

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First Off

First off, before another person asks why I deleted my Thailand Field Report thread – the answer is because I got Googled by a girl two days after fucking her. I saw her in the club the next day. She was, uhm, shall we say, not too happy about it.

Oops. I knew I lived on a small island. But damn, I didn’t realize it was that small.

Sorry Irish girl – if you’re reading this. Of the other 31 girls, you were special – truth.

Anyway…

Here’s another post about my home of the last seven months – a magical place that continues to completely fuck with my head:

The island of Ko Phangan, Thailand

The Story

A couple days ago, I was sitting in a restaurant behind two of the most attractive European girls I’ve ever seen in my life. And I mean this literally. These girls were absolutely stunning creatures. I couldn’t stop thinking about them for an hour. Even writing this post right now, I’m still literally in awe of their beauty. Flawless skin. Amazing faces. They looked like walking pieces of art.

So here are a couple questions:

Who were these girls sitting next to?
What turns them on?
Who are they fucking?

Here’s how I would have answered these questions a few months ago:

This girl is dating a hot guy named Brad. Brad is about 6 foot 2 inches tall. He drives a Porsche and works for a large consulting firm in New York. He made $250 thousand dollars last year. Brad has a great body and he goes to the gym 5 days a week. He graduated from Harvard University a while back, and everyone says how intelligent and articulate he is. He has travelled extensively through Europe and Asia and he speaks three languages. He is well cultured and all the girls say he’s a sexy dresser. He loves to take his dates out to fancy restaurants, and is quite the wine connoisseur. Brad is a pretty good social networker and loves to throw exquisite parties in his very expensive Manhattan loft.

And here my fine friends, is who she was ACTUALLY fucking last night:

Name: PingPong (or something)
Looks: I’d say he’s about a 4 out of 10.
Height: 5’-5”
Sexy Clothes: He wears the same grubby pair of black jeans every day. Never wears a shirt.
Money: He probably makes around $200 USD a month ($2,400 USD a year).
Language: Barely speaks English.
Education: I doubt he can even read and write Thai.
Well Traveled: Never left Thailand.
Social Networker: He hangs out with the bar staff. That’s about it.
Car: He shares a motor scooter with his friend.
Hot body: Super skinny, narrow – typical Asian Islander look.
Apartment: Lives in a shack.
Expensive dates: Ha ha. No. She probably pays for him most likely.
Fancy restaurants: There aren’t any in Ko Phangan.
Well mannered and cultured: I dunno. But I saw him break a chair over a Norwegian guy’s head once.

So what’s going on here?

How could it be that this amazing girl was so turned on by a dude such as this?

Quite simply, I’m here to tell you one thing:

I now finally believe that everything society told me about female attraction is absolute bull crap.

And 90% of us are killing ourselves in jobs we hate, to buy shit we don’t need, and striving for ridiculous goals that yield miniscule value to ourselves and others.

Well maybe he just got lucky? I mean how often does something like this really happen?

Every day.

I’ve lived here for seven months now. I’ve seen these guys pull some of the most attractive girls on the island. Utterly amazing to watch it go down in front of you. I wouldn’t believe it myself, if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.

So What’s His Game Then?

I’ve tried to watch him very carefully and, honestly I doubt he has much “game” at all. He doesn’t even seem all that smooth or natural – as I’ve seen in other Thai bartenders here. If you were to take this guy, dress him up, and throw him into a nightclub in London, I seriously doubt he could make anything happen.

Ok. So how does he do it then?

I’ll try to give my best rendering of what I think is going on here:

Situational Value, Novelty, and Disassortative Mating

For female attraction, the properties of Situational Value and Novelty cannot be stressed enough. What is unfortunate is that society at large seems wholly unaware of the power of these two concepts.

It is unfortunate that modern society stresses looks and youth and money in men. And yet, of all the vectors of female attraction, these three have exceptionally limited appeal.

Obviously, all bartenders have Situational Value in the bar, for several reasons:

Everyone in the bar wants something from them. They want a drink. (So, in a way, the girls are constantly opening them.)
The bartenders control who stays and who leaves. (It’s their party. It’s their home.)
The bartenders look out for each other. (Their crew is always behind them. Their friends are always near.)
The bartenders are social networkers by default. (Because they work every night, they see the same tourist girls again and again. Simply statistically speaking, they’re going to get to know a lot of people – at least at a cursory level.)
The bartenders have a reason to be in the bar that is NOT pickup. (Hence, if they are chatting up some girl, she already has the impression that he doesn’t “want something from me.”)

Now this is pretty much true for bartenders all over the world. But the Thai boys have the added bonus of “novelty”. Sure, any girl can go out in her hometown in New York, or Paris, or Rome, and chat to her local bartender. But this is Thailand. Most likely, she’s only been in the country a few days. And she’s never had a Thai guy pay much attention to her. (Thai guys don’t do approaches.) So to have the opportunity to meet a relatively cool local guy, with all this situational value behind him, is quite a novel affair.

More about the value of novelty in primates from Geoffrey Miller phd:

“Meredith Small has claimed that, ‘The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety.’ Chimpanzee females sometimes take considerable risks to mate with novel mates from outside their own groups.”
- The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, 412

There is a lot of controversial research out there on Disassortative Mating. In one study, men were more attracted to the smell of women who had immune systems that differed from their own. So perhaps there are some low-level evolutionary factors at play here as well. It could be that, somewhere in the brain of your average Norwegian hotty, there is a program running that is telling her that if she fucks a Thai guy, her children will have immune systems that have a higher probability of surviving the next cough and cold season. (Recall that the lower brain doesn’t know what a condom is.)

Situational Confidence and a Leading Frame

Consider what’s going on here. These girls are tourists, vacationing in a foreign country in which they don’t speak the language and they don’t know anyone here (save the one friend they’re usually travelling with). The Thai boys, on the other hand, have been living and working here for years.

Like I mentioned above, stick this Thai bartender in a club in London, and he’d probably just flounder. But over here, he’s got all the confidence in the world. For him, pickup is no more difficult than trying to pick up a girl in your own kitchen back home. He is in this bar every day – from about 6:00 PM to 5:00 AM. If you spent that much time in a club (any club) and you knew every single person who worked there, how much situational confidence would you have? Probably quite a bit.

Additionally, these guys are quite good at leading the girls around the clubs.

Example:

“OK you sit here now. I have to put these chairs away.”
“OK come on. This club is closing so we’re going to go to Drop-In Bar now. It’s the last one open.”
“Come on. Come with me I want to introduce you to my friend at the other bar.”
“Come on, we’re all going to sit over here and finish these beers. You come with us.”

And the girls just follow like moths to a flame. And why wouldn’t they? They are often freshly arrived to Ko Phangan. If they didn’t allow themselves to be ushered around, then they wouldn’t know where to go next. Nor do they know any other people here. So their options are fairly limited anyway.

Poll Position, Interactive Value Displays, and Fire Twirling

Not all bartenders get laid. In fact the vast majority of the local Thai population never ends up with western girls at all.

The below chart illustrates my best attempts to observe which bartenders get the girls.

We note that it is the bartenders who work in the small wooden protruding bar islands that get laid the most. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. These guys have “poll position”. Meaning, these guys are surrounded by the majority of the crowd. Simply statistically speaking, they have more opportunities to interact with the clientele.

Lately, I’ve been rehashing the old community concept of the “Interactive Value Display”. I feel that this notion is not nearly stressed as much as it should be. As we note, even the highest value guy in a venue (say he has looks, status, humor, wit, etc.) will ultimately rarely get laid, if he’s not interacting at all.

It is sometimes hard to get men to understand this concept because, high value girls (i.e. beautiful girls) are NEVER invisible to men. Girls could just stand with their faces against the club wall and, if they’re hot, we would all stare at their asses and look for windows of approach. With men, however, this just doesn’t work. A guy standing in the corner of the club not doing anything is just another potted plant.

So it is the bartenders who are “out there” with the crowd who get the girls. Also, it is important to note that the bartenders here actually wear two hats. They serve drinks, and they fire twirl. Now obviously, this allows for a nice opportunity for them to show these girls a pretty impressive artistic talent. And, as we all know, girls like men with artistic talents. Particularly when it involves athleticism, muscle precision, danger, and cheering crowds.

Social Calibration

A lot of these guys have been dealing with horny tourist girls since they were teenagers. Usually they’ll start off working in a restaurant in their mid teens. This often involves 12 hour late night shifts for 50 cents USD an hour. By the time they’ve landed a job in a club, they’ve already met thousands of girls from all over the world. They’ve dealt with flirtatious girls, drunk girls, girls wacked out on E or magic mushrooms, girls on coke, girls making out or getting fingered in public, girls fucking on the beach, etc. By the time they’re 18, they’ve seen way more than I ever saw in my little town in Orange County.

(Recall that the entire economy of this island revolves around The Full Moon Party – the biggest fuckfest in the world.)

Add on to all of that, the fact that they now work in a nightclub 14 hours a day, and you’ve got one socially calibrated dude. They may not speak English all that well. But they get pretty good at telling which girls are pullable tonight, and which girls are going home with someone else. And their body language, posture, and vocal tonality gets subconsciously tuned every night.

Show Her Your Island

I think it was in The Blueprint Decoded, where Tyler uses an excellent metaphor to illustrate the rolls that men and women adopt in the mating dance. He says something like:

‘in courtship, a woman is on a boat, and she is going to sail over to your island (your life, friends, ideas, thoughts) to have a look around. If she likes what she sees, she’ll make herself part of your world.’

Well this is quite literally the case where I live – which is actually an island. Tourists come to Thailand to explore a different world. For most of these young girls, everything here is somewhat new and different. They’re paying to holiday in a tropical island paradise and, if they spend time with these Thai bartenders, they have a free tour guide who knows everything about Thailand. In this scenario, rapport and sexual attraction just seem to develop naturally.

The “Good Genes / Good Provider” Dichotomy

Evolutionary psychology places a lot of emphasis on the supposed attractive male characteristics of having, either, good genes (i.e. being a sexy male), or being a good provider (i.e. being a rich male and a good daddy).

I used to place a lot of value on this paradigm. But these Thai bartenders are certainly not “good providers.” And, though there are attractive Thai men here, the ones I’ve been observing aren’t all that sexy at all.

It is sometimes all too easy to forget that girls like sex too.

[ In fact, as I am typing this post right now, there are two people from the U.K. fucking in my hotel hallway! What the fuck! Did she lose her key or something! God! Seven months on Ko Phangan and this place is still a mindfuck! ]

Anyway, my point is, these little Thai bartenders don’t offer good genes or money. But they offer good sex and good fun.

Gee, girls like fun and sex. What an epiphany!

I say this as a joke, but look around at the repressed women of the world. For example in the Middle East or even in the Victorian era. It seems that there are still large segments of various societies (including the western world) in which the notion that a girl would like to have a fun night out, and then get fucked silly, is frowned upon.

While coming down from magic mushrooms and having a discussion about this topic with a hot New Zealand chick last week, she told me something like, “Tony mate I tell ya. These girls are all horny as fuck. We only pretend we’re not because you guys would judge us!”

[ On a side note, needless to say, I didn’t end up having sex with her though. She loves her boyfriend too much. Bummer. ]

But anyway, a similar mantra is repeated throughout the community.

See also, Tyler’s paper on “The Secret Society.”

This ones from evolutionary psychologist David Buss:

“Women sometimes incur more severe costs than men do. Women risk impairing their desirability if they develop reputations for promiscuity since men prize fidelity in potential wives. Because of men’s abhorrence of promiscuity in a permanent partner, casual sex for women becomes a risky venture for their reputations. Women known as promiscuous suffer reputational damage even in relatively promiscuous cultures, such as among the Swedes and the Ache Indians.”
- The Evolution of Desire: Strategies for Human Mating

Ease of Discretion – What happens in Thailand, Stays in Thailand

And so, we come to another reason why the bartenders get laid. What happens in Thailand, stays in Thailand. When she goes back home to work and worry, no one has to know that she spent a week getting royally fucked repeatedly by a Thai bartender in a shack in the jungle.

She doesn’t have to deal with any of the social ramifications that society levies upon women for engaging in promiscuous behavior.

I think this is why so called “female sex tourism” is flourishing around the world. There are hundreds of papers on the topic online if you’re interested.

Abundance Mentality

Do you think these bartenders care if they get rejected by any one particular tourist girl tonight?

Nope.

Why?

Because every day, about a dozen boats arrive in Koh Phangan. And what are these boats carrying?

More tourist girls.

The Grouse

The famous Grouse experiment is often cited in the community. That being, a male Grouse was more likely to get laid, when researchers put a stuffed artificial female Grouse next to him.

In another experiment, women were asked to flip through a series of pictures and rate how attractive a man was. Then, researchers took the SAME pictures, and photoshoped in attractive females standing behind the men. When another group of women was asked how attractive the men in the new set of pictures were, the men in this second group gained two points.

And the moral of the story: Girls prefer to fuck men who are already preselected by other women.

So here again, we have yet another attraction vector that works to the Thai boys advantage. As stated previously, the ones who are down there in the crowd are basically talking to women all night. Moreover, other women see them talking to other women all night. This often creates a compounding effect – known in the community as a “Feeding Frenzy”, in which you have multiple girls competing for the attention of one Thai dude.

Congruency

Question, would your average Swedish girl date a Swedish guy who lives in a shack and makes 200 dollars a month, in her hometown in Sweden?

Possibly, but this would be a tougher sell.

One of the reasons these Thai guys can get away with having nothing, and yet having all the social value here, is because they are fabulously congruent.

In the girl’s mind, she’s thinking:
“Why of course my Thai bartender boyfriend lives in a shack in a jungle.”
“After all, he’s a Thai bartender.”

The girls actually expect these boys to have meager means. In fact, if they lived in expensive chateaus overlooking the ocean, this would actually be a major in-congruency, and may even be enough to put her attraction on pause. For as we all know, in-congruency is the enemy of female attraction. Much worse than, say, having a meager income.

Anyway

Well that’s my theory anyway. For what it’s worth.

Ok it’s midnight here. I’m going down to get rejected by girls and watch little Thai boys pull hotties.

God I hate them so!

Grrrrrr.

While it was actually a well written article, and very insightful. It reminds me of how much pick up artists over examine things, and read into stuff way too deeply. I no longer recomend guys to strive to become pick up artists because I’ve realized that it’s overly complicated.

Most guys, think they want to become a master pick up artist, but they really don’t, they probely won’t, and it won’t make them happy even if they did become one. Most guys really just want a good looking girlfriend that loves them, wants to have sex with him, and the ability to get another girl if things don’t work out with her.

Striving to become a “pick up artist” is like learning the inter workings of an automobile, understanding combustion, and the physics behind moving force. But really, most guys don’t need to know that, most people would just be happy knowing that if they turn the key and press on the gas, it goes. Anyways, here’s a ten second summary of the article.

The summary:

1. They don’t give a shit, they really do have abundance, there truly are thousands of hot ass girls there.

2. The Fire Dancing thing they do is SICKKKK, I get mezmorized watching it. Plus they’re shirtless, tattooed, covered in flames, and surrounded by people cheering. (i’m currently lessons from one of the guys)

3. They are a bartender, where alcohol flows, girls go.

4. It gives the girl a good story to tell, or memory not to tell.

5. Unlike “PUAs”, having limited english actually helps because they are forced not to talk too much.

6. He shows her the non-tourist side of the island, and introduces her to friends, locals, and his life.