Art of Seduction by Robert Greene — Notes

Sohil Gupta
29 min readDec 5, 2019

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Part 1: The Seductive Character

  1. There are nine seducer types in the world. Each type has a particular character trait that comes from deep within and creates a seductive pull.
  2. Sirens have an abundance of sexual energy and know how to use it. They lure in their targets, like the sirens of Odysseus, through their image and teases. Crafting the perfect seductive pose for their target.
  3. Rakes insatiably adore the opposite sex, and their desire is infectious. Unlike the normal, cautious male, the Rake is delightfully unrestrained, a slave to his love of women. There is the added lure of his reputation: so many women have succumbed to him, there has to be a reason.
  4. Remember: It is the form that matters, not the content. The less your targets focus on what you say, and the more on how it makes them feel, the more seductive your effect. Give your words a lofty, spiritual, literary flavor the better to insinuate desire in your unwitting victims.
  5. To play the Rake, the most obvious requirement is the ability to let yourself go, to draw a woman into the kind of purely sensual moment in which past and future lose meaning. You must be able to abandon yourself to the moment.
  6. If no obstacles face you, you must create them. Seduction requires obstacle.
  7. Ideal Lovers have an aesthetic sensibility that they apply to romance.
  8. Casanova was perhaps the most successful seducer in history; few women could resist him. His method was simple: on meeting a woman, he would study her, go along with her moods, find out what was missing in her life, and provide it. He made himself the Ideal Lover.
  9. But appeal to their better selves, to a higher standard of beauty, and they will hardly notice that they have been seduced. Make them feel elevated, lofty, spiritual, and your power over them will be limitless.
  10. Talleyrand simply held up a mirror to Napoleon and let him glimpse that possibility. People are always vulnerable to insinuations like this, which stroke their vanity almost everyone’s weak spot. Hint at something for them to aspire to, reveal your faith in some untapped potential you see in them, and you will soon have them eating out of your hand.
  11. Dandies like to play with their image, creating a striking and androgynous allure.
  12. Most of us feel trapped within the limited roles that the world expects us to play. We are instantly attracted to those who are more fluid, more ambiguous, than we are — those who create their own persona. Dandies excite us because they cannot be categorized, and hint at a freedom we want for ourselves.
  13. Dandies seduce socially as well as sexually; groups form around them, their style is wildly imitated, an entire court or crowd will fall in love with them. In adapting the Dandy character for your own purposes, remember that the Dandy is by nature a rare and beautiful flower. Be different in ways that are both striking and aesthetic, never vulgar; poke fun at current trends and styles, go in a novel direction, and be supremely uninterested in what anyone else is doing. Most people are insecure; they will wonder what you are up to, and slowly they will come to admire and imitate you, because you express yourself with total confidence.
  14. Naturals are spontaneous and open.
  15. Coquettes are self-sufficient, with a fascinating cool at their core. Coquettes seem totally self-sufficient: they do not need you, they seem to say, and their narcissism proves devilishly attractive.
  16. People are inherently perverse. An easy conquest has a lower value than a difficult one; we are only really excited by what is denied us, by what we cannot possess in full. Your greatest power in seduction is your ability to turn away, to make others come after you, delaying their satisfaction
  17. To understand the peculiar power of the Coquette, you must first understand a critical property of love and desire: the more obviously you pursue a person, the more likely you are to chase them away.
  18. Self-esteem is critical in seduction. (Your attitude toward yourself is read by the other person in subtle and unconscious ways.) Low self-esteem repels, confidence and self-sufficiency attract. The less you seem to need other people, the more likely others will be drawn to you.
  19. Charmers want and know how to please—they are social creatures.
  20. Charmers do not argue or fight, complain, or pester — what could be more seductive?
  21. First, they don’t talk much about themselves, which heightens their mystery and disguises their limitations. Second, they seem to be interested in us, and their interest is so delightfully focused that we relax and open up to them. Finally Charmers are pleasant to be around. They have none of most people’s ugly qualities — nagging, complaining, self-assertion.
  22. Charismatics have an unusual confidence in themselves.
  23. Learn to create the charismatic illusion by radiating intensity while remaining detached.
  24. People do not want to hear that your power comes from years of effort or discipline. They prefer to think that it comes from your personality, your character, something you were born with.
  25. Stars are ethereal and envelop themselves in mystery. People are hopelessly susceptible to myth, so make yourself the hero of a great drama. And keep your distance — let people identify with you without being able to touch you. They can only watch and dream.
  26. First, you must have such a large presence that you can fill your target’s mind the way a close-up fills the screen.
  27. Second, cultivate a blank, mysterious face, the center that radiates Starness.
  28. Anti-Seducers: Those who repel. Anti-Seducers come in many shapes and kinds, but almost all of them share a single attribute, the source of their repellence: insecurity.
  29. Seducers draw you in by the focused, individualized attention they pay to you. Anti-Seducers are the opposite: insecure, self-absorbed, and unable to grasp the psychology of another person, they literally repel. Anti- Seducers have no self-awareness, and never realize when they are pestering, imposing, talking too much. They lack the subtlety to create the promise of pleasure that seduction requires.
  30. The source of their repellence: insecurity.
  31. Perhaps they are ungenerous, or they argue with unusual tenacity, or are excessively judgmental. Perhaps they lavish you with undeserved praise, declaring their love before knowing anything about you. Or, most important, they pay no attention to details. Since they cannot see what makes you different, they cannot surprise you with nuanced attention
  32. An ungenerous person is seldom truly attractive. Seduction implies opening yourself up, even if only for the purposes of deception; being unable to give by spending money usually means being unable to give in general. Stamp ungenerosity out.
  33. The Brute: Who has no patience, who wants to skip the seduction, who offends with egotism.
  34. The Suffocator: Those who cling incessantly to you, love you before you know who they are, or who make themselves a doormat to you in their obsession.
  35. The Moralizer: Who wants you to bend to their standard.
  36. The Tightwad: Cheapness displays more insecurity beyond money.
  37. The Bumbler: The awkward speaker, who makes others feel awkward too.
  38. The Windbag: Who won’t shut up.
  39. The Reactor: Who is terrified to have their ego damaged.
  40. The Vulgarian: Who ignores the rules of the game, presents a garrish image, does not play the game and yet expects to win.
  41. It is rather because wordless communication (through clothes, gestures, actions) is the most pleasurable, exciting, and seductive form of language.

PART 2 The Seductive Process

  1. Prolonged inattention will not only break the seductive spell, it can create hatred.
  2. Claudius was an extreme of this behavior. His insensitivity was created by necessity: in acting like an imbecile, he hid his ambition and protected himself among dangerous competitors.
  3. People who have experienced some kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it.
  4. Love is transfer of ego-ideal, or finding traits that are lacking in self-ego in your partner. There can be no love when people are entirely satisfied with themselves.
  5. We remember pleasure and forget about pain from childhood, as adults, we become so oppressed from responsibilities of adult life, and yearn for the same powerlessness.
  6. When you make someone regress to childhood, it comes with sexual undertones. To regress, talk about their childhood. Also, while talking about childhood, there are slip-ups, and information and weaknesses are revealed about our mental makeup.
  7. Once you know the infatuation behind, you can take over that role.
  8. Infantile regression: Replicating unconditional motherly love, loving attention, comfort, even when they behave badly.
  9. Oedipal regression: mother, father and child oedipal triangle. It forms the earliest erotic fantasies. Mother to boy, and daughter to father.Mix tenderness with toughness and punishment. Include erotic component.
  10. Ego Ideal Regression: The first boy/girl we fall in love with has the ideal qualities we wanted for ourselves.We look for those ideals in adulthood, and disappointed that we couldn’t meet those ideals, and how far we have fallen from those ideals. This is more about regression to that of a sibling, brother or sister.
  11. Reverse Parental Regression: Here, you become the cute, adorable, sexually charged child. Older people always find younger people seductive. And they feel mother or father role-playing.
  12. Everyone has doubts and insecurities about their body, their self-worth, their sexuality.
  13. Religion is the most seductive system mankind has ever created. Death is our greatest fear, and religion
  14. Art is long, life is short — Picasso
  15. Culture and art has taken the place of religion in the modern world.
  16. Girls had sex with Picasso because they thought he could immortalize them with painting their pictures.
  17. There is no more seductive brew than the combination of the spiritual and the sexual, the high and the low.
  18. Lift your targets minds up to the stars and they will not notice what is happening on earth.
  19. Follow up pain with pleasure and you will create a state of dependency.
  20. Only choose those who are often isolated, or unhappy( perhaps because of recent adverse circumstances), or can easily be made so, because for seduction, the completely contented person is almost impossible to seduce.
  21. Just as it is hard to seduce a person who is happy, it’s harder to seduce a person who has no imagination.
  22. People who are outwardly distant shy or shy are better targets than extroverts.
  23. People with a lot of time are extremely susceptible for seduction. They have mental space for you to fill.
  24. A sense of danger and fear can heighten seduction at a later stage, but if you stir such emotions in the first stage, you will likely scare the target away.
  25. Ambivalence heightens seduction. If you are sweet looking, show signs of darkness, of being cruel.
  26. Pure goodness is rarely seductive.
  27. Displaying too much knowledge or efficiency shows people that you lack humanity.
  28. We can endure feeling that someone else has more talent, or more power, but the fact that other person is more desirable than us, that is unbearable.
  29. When people’s vanity is at risk, you can make them do whatever you want.
  30. If there is a woman you are interested in, pay attention to her sister. That will stir a triangular desire.
  31. People want what others are envious of.
  32. A perfectly satisfied person can’t be seduced. Tension and disharmony must be instilled in your target’s minds. Stir within them feelings of discomfort, an unhappiness with their circumstances and with themselves; their lives lacks adventure, they have strayed from the ideals of their youth, they have become boring. The feelings of adequacy that you create will give you space to insinuate yourself, to make them see you as the answer to their problems. Pain and anxiety are the proper precursors to pleasure. Learn to manufacture the need that you can fill.
  33. To relieve our feelings of boredome or inadequacy on our own takes too much effort; letting someone else do the job is both easier and more exciting.
  34. Make people anxious about future, make them depressed, make them question their identity, make them sense the boredom that gnaws at their life.
  35. Falling in love occurs more frequently among young people, since they are profoundly uncertain, unsure of their worth, and often ashamed of themselves. The same applies to other people of other ages when they lose something in their lives — when their youth ends, or when they grow old.
  36. You represent change, difference, a breakup of routine, the lure of exotic.
  37. People prefer to feel that if their life is uninteresting, it’s not because of themselves but because of their circumstances.
  38. Another area to aim at is victim’s past.
  39. Stirring dissatisfaction with the present and reminding people about the glorious past can unsettle their sense of identity.
  40. Before desire there must be pain. Aim the arrow at victim’s weakest spot, creating a wound that you can open and reopen.
  41. Making your targets feel dissatisfied and in need of your attention is essential, but if you are too obvious, they will see through and grow defensive. There is no defense against insinuation however. Make everything suggestive.
  42. Make insinuations about pleasure, wealth, health, adventure when your targets are most relaxed, or distracted.
  43. All of us are narcissists. When we were children our narcissism was physical: we were interested in our own image, our own body, as if it were a separate being. As we grow older, our narcissism grows more psychological: we become absorbed in our own tastes, opinions, experiences. A hard shell forms around us. Paradoxically, the way to entice people out of this shell is to become more like them, a kind of mirror image.
  44. The greatest seducers in history grew up surrounded by women and had a touch of femininity themselves.
  45. A woman may fear male aggression and violence.
  46. Entering someone’s spirit is the most devilish seductive tactic. It gives your victims the feeling that they are seducing you.
  47. Keep the future gains vague, and somewhat out of reach. Be too specific and you will disappoint, make the promise too close at hand, and you will not be able to postpone satisfaction long enough to get what you want.
  48. The only way to get rid of the temptation is to yield to it. — Oscar Wilde
  49. When children are waiting for their surprise, their willpower is suspended.
  50. A child is usually a willful, stubborn creature who will deliberately do the opposite of what we ask. But there is one scenario in which children will happily give up their usual willfulness, when they are promised a surprise.
  51. The seduced wants to be led, be it in dancing, to be carried along like a child.
  52. Surprise your victim, send a letter out of the blue, take them to a place where they have never been. Reveal something new abut your character.
  53. Act a little more reserved when they perceive you as shy, practical, puritanical. Then suddenly surprise them with bold or poetic or naughty action.
  54. Surprise creates a moment when people’s defenses come down, and new emotions rush in.
  55. Not only does suddenness create a seductive jolt, it conceals manipulation.
  56. To keep the public’s attention, keep them guessing.
  57. To get people’s attention, say to them what they want to hear, to fill their ears with whatever is pleasant to them. Inflame people’s emotions with loaded phrases, flatter them, comfort their insecurities, envelop them in fantasies, sweet words, and promises, and they’ll lose their will to resist you.
  58. To make music instead of noise, you must say things that please — things that relate to people’s lives, that touch their vanity.

Chapter 4: Appear to be an object of desire: Create triangles

  1. Few are drawn to the person whom others avoid or neglect; people gather around those who have already attracted interest. We want what other people want. To draw your victims closer and make them hungry to possess you, you must create an aura of desirability—of being wanted and courted by many. It will become a point of vanity for them to be the preferred object of your attention, to win you away from a crowd of admirers. Manufacture the illusion of popularity by surrounding yourself with members of the opposite sex—friends, former lovers, present suitors. Create triangles that stimulate rivalry and raise your value. Build a reputation that precedes you: if many have succumbed to your charms, there must be a reason.
  2. Most of the time we prefer one thing to another because that is what our friends already prefer or because that object has marked social significance. Adults, when they are hungry, are just like children in that they seek out the foods that others take. In their love affairs, they seek out the man or woman whom others find attractive and abandon those who are not sought after. When we say of a man or woman that he or she is desirable, what we really mean is that others desire them. It is not that they have some particular quality, but because they conform to some currently modish model. —SERGE MOSCOVICI, THE AGE OF THE CROWD:A HISTORICAL TREATISE ON MASS PSYCHOLOGY, TRANSLATED BY J. C. WHITEHOUSE
  3. It will be greatly to your advantage to entertain the lady you would win with an account of the number of women who are in love with you, and of the decided advances which they have made to you; for this will not only prove that you are a great favorite with the ladies, and a man of true honor, but it will convince her that she may have the honor of being enrolled in the same list, and of being praised in the same way, in the presence of your other female friends. This will greatly delight her, and you need not be surprised if she testifies her admiration of your character by throwing her arms around your neck on the spot. —LOLA MONTEZ, THE ARTS AND SECRETS OF BEAUTY, WITH HINTS TO GENTLEMEN ON THE ART OF FASCINATING
  4. Our desire for another person almost always involves social considerations: we are attracted to those who are attractive to other people. We want to possess them and steal them away
  5. In the end, much of it has to do with vanity and greed. Do not whine and moralize about people’s selfishness, but simply use it to your advantage. The illusion that you are desired by others will make you more attractive to your victims than your beautiful face or your perfect body. And the most effective way to create that illusion is to create a triangle: impose another person between you and your victim, and subtly make your victim aware of how much this other person wants you. The third point on the triangle does not have to be just one person: surround yourself with admirers, reveal your past conquests—in other words, envelop yourself in an aura of desirability. Make your targets compete with your past and your present.
  6. Fail to make yourself an object of desire right from the start, and you will end up the sorry slave to the whims of your lovers—they will abandon you the moment they lose interest.
  7. A person will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is desired by another person whom he admires. —RENÉ GIRARD
  8. We are social creatures, and are immensely influenced by the tastes and desires of other people
  9. René Girard’s mimetic desire occurs when an individual subject desires an object because it is desired by another subject, here designated as the rival: desire is modeled on the wishes or actions of another. Every desire is the desire of the other (and not immediately desire of an object), every structure of desire is triangular (including the other— mediatoror model— whose desire desire imitates), every desire is thus from its inception tapped by hatred and rivalry; in short, the origin of desire is mimesis—mimeticism—and no desire is ever forged which does not desire forthwith the death or disappearance of the model or exemplary character which gave rise to it. —JAMES MANDRELL, DON JUAN AND THE POINT OF HONOR
  10. Desirability is a social illusion. Its source is less what you say or do, or any kind of boasting or self-advertisement, than the sense that other people desire you.
  11. Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have).
  12. Make people compete for your attention, make them see you as sought after by everyone else. The aura of desirability will envelop you.
  13. Stirring people’s desire to possess him by holding back not only stimulate competitive desires, it takes aim at people’s prime weakness: their vanity and self-esteem.
  14. We can endure feeling that another person has more talent, or more money, but the sense that a rival is more desirable than we are—that is unbearable.
  15. When people’s vanity is at risk, you can make them do whatever you want.
  16. According to Stendhal, if there is a woman you are interested in, pay attention to her sister. That will stir a triangular desire.
  17. I don’t want any of the good things of life unless people are envious of them. —PETRONIUS,
  18. At a social affair, for instance, make sure that your target has to chat with the most boring person available. Come to the rescue and your target will be delighted to see you.
  19. To make use of contrasts, either develop and display those attractive attributes (humor, vivacity, and so on) that are the scarcest in your own social group, or choose a group in which your natural qualities are rare, and will shine.
  20. Do not let your targets see you so often; keep your distance, seem unattainable, out of their reach. An object that is rare and hard to obtain is generally more prized.

Chapter 5: Create a Need—Stir Anxiety and Discontent

  1. A perfectly satisfied person cannot be seduced. Tension and disharmony must be instilled in your targets’ minds. Stir within them feelings of discontent, an unhappiness with their circumstances and with themselves: their life lacks adventure, they have strayed from the ideals of their youth, they have become boring. The feelings of inadequacy that you create will give you space to insinuate yourself, to make them see you as the answer to their problems. Pain and anxiety are the proper precursors to pleasure. Learn to manufacture the need that you can fill.
  2. No one can fall in love if he is even partially satisfied with what he has or who he is
  3. The experience of falling in love originates in an extreme depression, an inability to find something that has value in everyday life.
  4. The “symptom” of the predisposition to fall in love is not the conscious desire to do so, the intense desire to enrich our lives; it is the profound sense of being worthless and of having nothing that is valuable and the shame of not having it
  5. Falling in love occurs more frequently among young people, since they are profoundly uncertain, unsure of their worth, and often ashamed of themselves.The same thing applies to people of other ages when they lose something in their lives—when their youth ends or when they start to grow old. —FRANCESCO ALBERONI, FALLINGIN LOVE, TRANSLATED BY LAWRENCE VENUTI
  6. Anxiety, a feeling of lack and need, is the precursor of all desire. Without anxiety and a sense of lack there can be no seduction.
  7. Desire and love have for their object things or qualities which a man does not at present possess but which he lacks. —SOCRATES
  8. People are always susceptible to being seduced, because in fact everyone lacks a sense of completeness, feels something missing deep inside. Bring their doubts and anxieties to the surface and they can be led and lured to follow you.
  9. Before the seduction proceeds, you must place a mirror in front of them in which they glimpse that inner emptiness. Made aware of a lack, they now can focus on you as the person who can fill that empty space.
  10. The desire to have someone fill up our emptiness is the weakness on which all seducers prey.
  11. Make people anxious about the future, make them depressed, make them question their identity, make them sense the boredom that gnaws at their life. The ground is prepared.
  12. Make your victims feel that by comparison their lives are boring and their friends less interesting than they had thought.
  13. People prefer to feel that if their life is uninteresting, it not because of themselves but because of their circumstances, the dull people they know, the town into which they were born. Once you make them feel the lure of the exotic, seduction is easy.
  14. The normal rhythm of life oscillates in general between a mild satisfaction with oneself and a slight discomfort, originating in the knowledge of one’s personal shortcomings.
  15. Old age is constantly seduced by youth, but first the young people must make it clear what the older ones are missing. Only then will they feel that the presence of the young will let them recapture that spark, the rebellious spirit that age and society have conspired to repress.
  16. Corporations and politicians know that they cannot seduce their public into buying what they want them to buy, or doing what they want them to do, unless they first awaken a sense of need and discontent.
  17. Make the masses uncertain about their identity and you can help define it for them.
  18. Stirring dissatisfaction with the present and reminding people about the glorious past can unsettle their sense of identity. Then you can be the one to redefine it—a grand seduction.
  19. What awakens desire in the seduced is not a soft touch or a pleasant sensation; it is a wound. The arrow creates a pain, an ache, a need for relief. Before desire there must be pain. Aim the arrow at the victim’s weakest spot, creating a wound that you can open and reopen.
  20. Reversal: If you go too far in lowering the targets’ self-esteem they may feel too insecure to enter into your seduction.
  21. Charm is often a subtler and more effective route to seduction.
  22. People who are riddled with insecurities may require the gentler variety. Once they feel comfortable with you, aim your arrows.

Chapter 20 Mix Pleasure with Pain

  1. The greatest mistake in seduction is being too nice. At first, perhaps, your kindness is charming, but it soon grows monotonous; you are trying too hard to please, and seem insecure. Instead of overwhelming your targets with niceness, try inflicting some pain. Lure them in with focused attention, then change direction, appearing suddenly uninterested. Make them feel guilty and insecure. Even instigate a breakup, subjecting them to an emptiness and pain that will give you room to maneuver — now a rapprochement, an apology, a return to your earlier kindness, will turn them weak at the knees. The lower the lows you create, the greater the highs. To heighten the erotic charge, create the excitement of fear.
  2. The more one pleases generally, the less one pleases profoundly. — STENDHAL, LOVE , TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND SUZANNE SALE
  3. Your seduction should never follow a simple course upward toward pleasure and harmony. The climax will come too soon, and the pleasure will be weak.
  4. What makes us intensely appreciate something is previous suffering. A brush with death makes us fall in love with life; a long journey makes a return home that much more pleasurable.
  5. anger is a sure sign that you have your hooks in them. Nor should you be afraid that if you make yourself difficult people will flee — we only abandon those who bore us.
  6. The ride on which you take your victims can be tortuous but never dull. At all costs, keep your targets emotional and on edge. Create enough highs and lows and you will wear away the last vestiges of their willpower.
  7. The classic seductive approach of charm and flattery would get nowhere with powerful people; they would see right through it.
  8. Instead, prey on their emotions, alternating harshness and kindness. Ask a cruel question that touches on the deepest insecurities of the subject, who would get emotional and defensive; deep down, though, something else would stir inside them — the desire to prove to you that they did not deserve your implicit criticisms.
  9. In social situations we all wear masks, and keep our defenses up. It is embarrassing, after all, to reveal one’s true feelings. As a seducer you must find a way to lower these resistances.
  10. The Charmer’s approach of flattery and attention can be effective here, particularly with the insecure, but it can take months of work, and can also backfire. To get a quicker result, and to break down more inaccessible people, it is often better to alternate harshness and kindness.
  11. By being harsh you create inner tensions — your targets may be upset with you, but they are also asking themselves questions. What have they done to earn your dislike? When you then are kind, they feel relieved, but also concerned that at any moment they might somehow displease you again. Make use of this pattern to keep them in suspense — dreading your harshness and keen to keep you kind. Your kindness and harshness should be subtle; indirect digs and compliments are best.
  12. Play the psychoanalyst: make cutting comments concerning their unconscious motives (you are only being truthful), then sit back and listen. Your silence will goad them into embarrassing admissions. Leaven your judgments with occasional praise and they will strive to please you, like dogs.
  13. Love is a costly flower, but one must have the desire to pluck it from the edge of a precipice. — STENDHAL
  14. Almost everyone is more or less polite. We learn early on not to tell people what we really think of them; we smile at their jokes, act interested in their stories and problems. It is the only way to live with them. Eventually this becomes a habit; we are nice, even when it isn’t really necessary. We try to please other people, to not step on their toes, to avoid disagreements and conflict.
  15. Niceness in seduction, though it may at first draw someone to you (it is soothing and comforting), soon loses all effect. Being too nice can literally push the target away from you. Erotic feeling depends on the creation of tension.
  16. Without tension, without anxiety and suspense, there can be no feeling of release, of true pleasure and joy. It is your task to create that tension in the target, to stimulate feelings of anxiety, to lead them to and fro, so that the culmination of the seduction has real weight and intensity.
  17. So rid yourself of your nasty habit of avoiding conflict, which is in any case unnatural. You are most often nice not out of your own inner goodness but out of fear of displeasing, out of insecurity. Go beyond that fear and you suddenly have options — the freedom to create pain, then magically dissolve it. Your seductive powers will increase tenfold.
  18. People will be less upset by your hurtful actions than you might imagine. In the world today, we often feel starved for experience. We crave emotion, even if it is negative. The pain you cause your targets, then, is bracing — it makes them feel more alive.
  19. They have something to complain about, they get to play the victim. As a result, once you have turned the pain into pleasure they will readily forgive you.
  20. Stir up their jealousy, make them feel insecure, and the validation you later give their ego by preferring them over their rivals is doubly delightful.
  21. You have more to fear by boring your targets than by shaking them up. Wounding people binds them to you more deeply than kindness. Create tension so you can release it.
  22. If you need inspiration, find the part of the target that most irritates you and use it as a springboard for some therapeutic conflict. The more real your cruelty, the more effective it is.
  23. First, if you fear the loved one, you can never get too close or familiar with him or her. The beloved then retains an element of mystery, which only intensifies your love.
  24. Second, there is something bracing about fear. It makes you vibrate with sensation, heightens your awareness, is intensely erotic.
  25. The closer the loved one brings you to the edge of the precipice, to the feeling that they could abandon you, the dizzier and more lost you will become. Falling in love means literally falling — losing control, a mix of fear and excitement.
  26. Never let your targets get too comfortable with you. They need to feel fear and anxiety. Show them some coldness, a flash of anger they did not expect. Be irrational if necessary. There is always the trump card: a breakup. Let them feel they have lost you forever, make them fear that they have lost the power to charm you. Let these feelings sit with them for a while, then pull them back from the precipice. The reconciliation will be intense.
  27. Many of us have masochistic (deriving sexual gratification from one’s own pain or humiliation) yearnings without realizing it. It takes someone to inflict some pain on us for these deeply repressed desires to come to the surface.
  28. There are people who feel that they deserve nothing good in life, and who, unable to deal with success, sabotage themselves constantly. Be nice to them, admit that you admire them, and they are uncomfortable, since they feel that they cannot possibly match up to the ideal figure you have clearly imagined them to be. Such self-saboteurs do better with a little punishment; scold them, make them aware of their inadequacies. They feel they deserve such criticism and when it comes it is with a sense of relief. It is also easy to make them feel guilty, a feeling that deep down they enjoy.
  29. Other people experience the responsibilities and duties of modern life as such a heavy burden, they long to give it all up. These people are often looking for someone or something to worship — a cause, a religion, a guru. Make them worship you.
  30. Then there are those who want to play the martyr. Recognize them by the joy they take in complaining, in feeling righteous and wronged; then give them a reason to complain.
  31. Appearances deceive. Often the strongest-looking people — the Kissingers and Don Mateos — may secretly want to be punished. In any event, follow up pain with pleasure and you will create a state of dependency that will last for a long time.
  32. At the edge of a cliff, people often feel lightheaded, both, fearful and dizzy. For a moment they can imagine themselves falling headlong. At the same time, a part of them is tempted. Lead your targets as close to the edge as possible, then pull them back. No thrill without fear.
  33. People who have recently experienced a lot of pain or a loss will flee if you try to inflict more on them. They have enough in their lives already. Far better to surround these types with pleasure — that will put them under your spell.
  34. The technique of inflicting pain works best on those who have it easy, who have power and few problems. People with comfortable lives may also feel a gnawing sense of guilt, as if they had gotten away with something. They may not consciously know it, but secretly they long for some punishment, a good mental thrashing, something that will bring them back down to earth.
  35. Remember to not use the pleasure-through-pain tactic too early on.
  36. In the beginning, wear the mask of a lamb, making pleasure and attentiveness your bait. First get under their skin, then lead them on a wild ride.

PHASE FOUR Moving In for the Kill

  1. First you worked on their mind — the mental seduction. Then you confused and stirred them up — the emotional seduction. Now the time has come for hand-to-hand combat — the physical seduction. At this point, your victims are weak and ripe with desire: by showing a little coldness or uninterest, you will spark panic — they will come after you with impatience and erotic energy.
  2. The moment to strike and move in for the kill is when your victim is brimming with desire, but not consciously expecting the climax to come.
  3. Once the seduction is over, there is the danger that disenchantment will set in and ruin all your hard work.
  4. If you are after a relationship, then you must constantly re-seduce the victim, creating tension and releasing it. if your victim is to be sacrificed, then it must be done swiftly and cleanly, leaving you free (physically and psychologically) to move on to the next victim. Then the game begins all over.

CHAPTER 21 Give Them Space to Fall — The Pursuer Is Pursued

  1. If your targets become too used to you as the aggressor, they will give less of their own energy, and the tension will slacken. You need to wake them up, turn the tables. Once they are under your spell, take a step back and they will start to come after you. Begin with a touch of aloofness, an unexpected nonappearance, a hint that you are growing bored. Stir the pot by seeming interested in someone else. Make none of this explicit; let them only sense it and their imagination will do the rest, creating the doubt you desire. Soon they will want to possess you physically, and restraint will go out the window. The goal is to have them fall into your arms of their own will. Create the illusion that the seducer is being seduced.
  2. Omissions, denials, deflections, deceptions, diversions, and humility — all aimed at provoking this second state, the secret of true seduction.
  3. Vulgar seduction might proceed by persistence, but true seduction proceeds by absence.
  4. It is always best to keep at some distance from your targets.
  5. You do not want to be seen too often, or to be seen as intrusive. If you are always in their face, always the aggressor, they will become used to being passive, and the tension in your seduction will flag.
  6. Use letters to make them think about you all the time, to feed their imagination. Cultivate mystery — stop them from figuring you out.
  7. Love would not be possible without having been loved and then having missed the certainty of being loved
  8. Deliver the pleasurable climax they are so greedily awaiting, succumb to the natural tendency to bring the seduction to a rapid end, and you will have missed an opportunity to ratchet up the tension, to make the affair more heated.
  9. Once your victims overcome some of their doubts, and begin to fall under your spell, they will reach a point where they start to let go. They may sense that you are leading them along, but they are enjoying it.
  10. The target is falling for you now, and your retreat will lead to panicky thoughts: you are losing interest, it is somehow my fault, perhaps it is something I have done.
  11. Rather than think you are rejecting them on your own, your targets will want to make this interpretation, since if the cause of the problem is something they have done, they have the power to win you back by changing their behavior. If you are simply rejecting them, on the other hand, they have no control.
  12. People always want to preserve hope.
  13. A person’s willpower is directly linked to their libido, their erotic desire.
  14. When your victims are passively waiting for you, their erotic level is low. When they turn pursuer, getting involved in the process, brimming with tension and anxiety, the temperature is raised. So raise it as high as you can.
  15. When you withdraw, make it subtle; you are instilling unease. Your coldness or distance should dawn on your targets when they are alone, in the form of a poisonous doubt creeping into their mind. Their paranoia will become self-generating.
  16. Your subtle step back will make them want to possess you, so they will willingly advance into your arms without being pushed.
  17. This is different from the strategy in chapter 20, in which you are inflicting deep wounds, creating a pattern of pain and pleasure. There the goal is to make your victims weak and dependent, here it is to make them active and aggressive. Which strategy you prefer to use (the two cannot be combined) depends on what you want and the proclivities of your victim.
  18. When you seem interested in someone but do not respond sexually, it is disturbing, and presents a challenge: they will find a way to seduce you.
  19. To produce this effect, first reveal an interest in your targets, through letters or subtle insinuation. But when you are in their presence, assume a kind of sexless neutrality. Be friendly, even warm, but no more. You are pushing them into arming themselves with the seductive charms that are natural to their sex — exactly what you want.
  20. In the latter stages of the seduction, let your targets feel that you are becoming interested in another person — this is another form of taking a step back.
  21. Once someone has fallen for you, any physical absence will create unease. You are literally creating space.
  22. In your absence, their appreciation of you will grow. They will forget your faults, forgive your sins. The moment you return, they will chase after you as you desire. It will be as if you had come back from the dead.
  23. We learn to love only through rejection. — Theodor Reik
  24. As infants, we are showered with love by our mother — we know nothing else. But when we get a little older, we begin to sense that her love is not unconditional. If we do not behave, if we do not please her, she can withdraw it. The idea that she will withdraw her affection fills us with anxiety, and, at first, with anger — we will show her, we will throw a tantrum. But that never works, and we slowly realize that the only way to keep her from rejecting us again is to imitate her — to be as loving, kind, and affectionate as she is. This will bond her to us in the deepest way. The pattern is ingrained in us for the rest of our lives: by experiencing a rejection or a coldness, we learn to court and pursue, to love.
  25. Re-create this primal pattern in your seduction. First, shower your targets with affection. They will not be sure where this is coming from, but it is a delightful feeling, and they will never want to lose it. When it does go away, in your strategic step back, they will have moments of anxiety and anger, perhaps throwing a tantrum, and then the same childlike reaction: the only way to win you back, to have you for sure, will be to reverse the pattern, to imitate you, to be the affectionate, giving one. It is the terror of rejection that turns the tables.
  26. One person goes cold, the other pursues, then goes cold in turn, making the first person the pursuer, and on and on. As a seducer, do not leave this to chance. Make it happen. You are teaching the other person to become a seducer, just as the mother in her own way taught the child to return her love by turning her back. For your own sake learn to relish this reversal of roles. Do not merely play at being the pursued, but enjoy it, give in to it. The pleasure of being pursued by your victim can often surpass the thrill of the hunt.
  27. There are moments when creating space and absence will blow up in your face. An absence at a critical moment in the seduction can make the target lose interest in you. It also leaves too much to chance — while you are away, they could find another person, who will distract their thoughts from you.
  28. Use absence only when you are sure of the target’s affection, and never let it go on too long. It is most effective later in the seduction. Also, never create too much space — don’t write too rarely, don’t act too cold, don’t show too much interest in someone else. That is the strategy of mixing pleasure with pain, detailed in chapter 20, and will create a dependent victim, or will even make him or her give up completely
  29. Some people, too, are inveterately passive: they are waiting for you to make the bold move, and if you don’t, they will think you are weak. The pleasure to be had from such a victim is less than the pleasure you will get from someone more active. But if you are involved with such a type, do what you need to if you are to have your way, then end the affair and move on.

CHAPTER 22 Use Physical Lures

  1. Targets with active minds are dangerous: if they see through your manipulations, they may suddenly develop doubts. Put their minds gently to rest, and waken their dormant senses, by combining a nondefensive attitude with a charged sexual presence. While your cool, nonchalant air is calming their minds and lowering their inhibitions, your glances, voice, and bearing — oozing sex and desire — are getting under their skin, agitating their senses and raising their temperature. Never force the physical; instead infect your targets with heat, lure them into lust. Lead them into the moment — an intensified present in which morality, judgment, and concern for the future all melt away and the body succumbs to pleasure.

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Sohil Gupta
Sohil Gupta

Written by Sohil Gupta

Investor, Ex-PayTM, DCE Alumnus, Crypto, Web3

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