Life Features

Shit with women? Help is here – in the form of in-field training that involves approaching real life girls and receiving feedback and pointers. But does it work? JOE went along to find out.

By Robert Carry

The thought of approaching a group of women in a bar is enough to strike terror into the heart of many a chap, but the fear of spending night after night in an empty bed before dying alone without anyone noticing until your neighbours complain of the smell, can be a great motivator. So, more and more men, with varying degrees of social fluency, are looking at how they can improve their success rate with the mysterious, wonderful, yet sometimes terrifying opposite sex.

Legions of men have been swearing by the tutorage of the likes of Neil Strauss, who shot to fame when he released The Game. The book was built around his account of his time spent honing his skills with women to the point where he was beating off beautiful celebrities with a shitty stick.

The book helped trigger a massive surge in interest in the concept that there was a body of knowledge out there that, if learned, practiced and perfected, could turn the average bloke into girl heroin. However, there is only so much to be learned from books and demand for face-to-face guidance birthed a string of companies offering to help students of the discipline.

Sociology

Kama Lifestyles, headed by psychology and sociology graduate Stephen Nolan, has come to be seen as the leading light here in Ireland. The firm offers one-on-one training, seminars and boot-camps. However, they also operate field trips that involve taking students out, showing them how to approach women, watching them give it a crack and then giving advice based on performance.

JOE journalists live under a constant state of siege with overly amorous women attempting to sexually assault us every time we leave the office to get a breakfast roll from the garage. We don't even pay most of them. Nonetheless, one of us (that'll be me) was given the opportunity to go along to a Kama Lifestyles event to see if there wasn’t a tip or two we could pick up and share with the world.

The event began with a two-hour seminar in the Temple Bar Hotel, at which Stephen and fellow tutor Emre took the floor. The students in attendance were very much a mixed bag. One bloke was friendly, well-turned out, of sound mind and body, and free of any visible flaws that might prove fatal when approaching a group of women.

At the other end of the scale was a diminutive, aimlessly aggressive, bizarrely dressed lad equipped with a poor standard of English. Talking to English-speaking women with crap English might prove problematic, I imagined.

They kicked off by showing secretly filmed footage of the duo working their way into groups of women before coming away with a number.

The seminar was well put together and the tutors had a clear view of what they hoped to achieve with the students during the evening. It kicked off with guidelines on how to deal with the most difficult part of getting yourself a girlfriend/companion for the evening – the approach.

Understandably, the pair were eager to demonstrate the fact that they were not aiming to teach anything that they were not capable of doing themselves, so they kicked off by showing secretly filmed footage of the duo working their way into groups of women before coming away with a number.

The interactions looked at first to be casual affairs but once broken down were actually made up of a sequence of slavishly practiced techniques. In other words, the pair was not relying on any natural attraction that may or may not occur – they were winning digits through a skill set that could be learned. Theoretically, by anyone.

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