“Peacocking” is the Most Effective Sex-Repellent Ever Invented

Warning: Toxic Contents Under Pressure; Fragile Masculinity Ahead

I used to joke that I believed that Axe Body Spray was secretly invented by women so they could smell douchebags from a mile away and know who to avoid. We could say that it was sex-repellent that was packaged and sold in a can that promised, right there on the label, to attract women. Their commercials told us so.

Something tells me that if I were to scan the last two decades, I’d find plenty of similar male trends that one could reasonably suspect the same with. At this point, they seem to all have culminated in this weird culture of toxic masculinity and fear-based, reactive men who can’t so much as be told that women are having casual sex — without them — without throwing a tantrum, not unlike fourth-grade boys who didn’t get to play with their favorite toy and had to sit out during recess. When women lob the accusation of toxic masculinity against us, we’re defenseless, like those very same helpless children and that’s because we ourselves rendered ourselves helpless. We gave women all the ammo they need to rightfully accuse us of such things.

Can we just let the poor, pathetic, bad, old meme of pickup-artist ideology die out yet? We should have seen it coming in the early-to-mid-2000s, that there’d be a group of guys out there who took evolutionary science a little too seriously — or not seriously enough — and decided to utilize a vague and piss-poor reading of the far-from-complete scientific literature on the subject to try and obtain abundant sex. It’s as predictable as the dopey and dim-witted males of the nineties romantic comedies, the antagonist who seemingly has it all together, the protagonist’s biggest threat, but over the course of the film, he only reveals his shallowness and ineptitude. I think RomComs were one of the most damaging genres of cinema and I stand by that assertion. Perhaps it was a case of life influencing art, perhaps it was just a group of dudes who got together and decided that lonely and single men were the easiest target-audience who were the most receptive to empty promises, or perhaps these guys really did find a few lucky truffles and claim that they’d discovered the fountain of youth — or hot, plentiful, youthful women, at least.

The whole thing reeked of misogyny and dehumanization from the beginning. I witnessed it all as a casual spectator, but somewhere between Britney shaving her head and Lada Gaga showing up for a season of American Horror Story, the undercurrents of male chauvinism were lost in the sauce of our culture of media abundance. Be provocative, be feisty, be downright mean, assert your dominance, “fake it ’til ya’ make it,” and other memetic slogans of rude divisiveness spread in forums on the internet abound within the movement. Visiting one such site at the behest of a friend, I found myself immersed in a world that discussed neuro-linguistic programming and other pseudo-scientific ideas that are patently bunk. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. Skip ahead to a decade or two later, depending on which part of the timeline you want to start with, and you’ll find that many of these men are disgruntled, angry, fed up, and mostly turning into what we see now as the meteoric rise of the INCEL movement. If you wonder where all of these hyper-aggressive men came from who chose to weaponize their votes and piss off women, liberals, and other people who are generally getting way more sex than them, the answer lies in part, I believe, in the failures of the Pick-up Artist Movement.

Like the bottom-feeders of a multi-level marketing scheme, the guys who got in late were left holding the bag when, over time, women got wise to the games, all while the originators of the movement probably made off quite rich and well-off, and they’re thoroughly pissed off about this fact. Meanwhile, the creators probably found and secured solid relationships with their newfound celebrity status, a status that would come and go as quickly as any other fad.

One of the curious features of this movement was the insistence on image, rather than substance, for most of the practitioners and teachers alike. This was the art of “peacocking” which is now little more than a mockery and outdated trend not unlike the barbed wire tattoo that went around the bicep, especially if the said tattoo was combined with a shaved head to mask an oncoming natural baldness. Peacocking is the art of showing off, wearing flashy clothes that often resembled seventies “pimp” outfits, and generally being an insufferable attention-whore of a man. It was consumerism at its most conspicous — emptiness at its most grandiose. All of it, and yes, I mean all of it merely screams of a sense of woeful inadequacy and a sense of just not being good enough. It’s as if depression and social anxiety got together and formed a movement, a boys-only club that excluded both female participation and input at all costs while promising never to actually address their own issues. Someone apparently forgot to tell these boys that you must first know what women want in order to give it to them.

Even now, a quick query by way of the Medium search box will yield primarily male-dominated results, if we search for just “peacocking” by itself. The term is a very male term that speaks to male imaginations. It’s a weird male fetish, the art of looking good and attracting women in the same way that they feel women attract them. Men, being obsessed with women's appearance and not much caring about what’s beyond the mask, wrongfully assumed that women must view them the same way — instrumentally, unnuanced, and shallowly. The idea of peacocking is to become hyper-focused on sending out signals that women are supposed to respond to and find themselves falling all over one another to run screaming for the attention of peacocking male, as he drives away in his 1993 Honda Civic that he’s added an obnoxious muffler to in order to annoy every woman within a half-mile radius with the sound of an angry mosquito spewing from his automobile — an angry mosquito that musters up an occasional fart and then “pops” before it speeds off. These are the quite ridiculous lengths men will go to in order to be perceived as someone who might someday attract women…someday.

Is peacocking dead? I think if it isn’t, it ought to be. And if by “dead” we mean that it doesn’t happen anymore, certainly not, I think men are just much more bashful about admitting to their use of tactics to try and, let’s face it, manipulate women. Now that most women have caught on, men as a whole have turned to good ol’ fashion outright aggression and bullying. Thenceforth commeth toxic masculinity. You see, the thing about this Pickup-Artist Movement and the fundamental flaw in PUA logic is the fact that it never intended to see women as equals. The whole goal was to just score. The Pickup scene only ever wanted to control women and you can see this by the promises made by its success stories, with every site that showed some average guy in a plain t-shirt and cargo shorts, usually with sandals and a big smile on his face, being surrounded by well-dressed women in high heels, uncomfortable dresses, tons of make-up that must’ve taken hours to apply, and all of this complete with fake eyelashes, shaved vulvas and legs, and an ever-eager gaze in their eyes that said, “Come fuck me, right now.” Ah, yes, the peacocking was intended to manifest the women of porn into reality, in-the-flesh, on-the-spot, in a beautifully effortless way. If by “dead” we mean that peacocking no longer works, I can certainly say with a frightening degree of confidence, yes, it is dead. It’s dead because men killed it. Not that it ever really worked outside of the exceptional stroke of luck.

You see, the whole thing never took women into consideration in the first place. The whole thing was predicated upon what men wanted women to want, rather than what women actually want, which conveniently corresponds with the things which are reasonably accessible to buy, ignoring the much more difficult aspects of changing the parts of ourselves on the inside which are frankly repulsive and might hinder our chances at treating women with respect and integrity. Women have now woken up to the fact that a bulk of certain men in our society have been employing tactics for a very long time, basically being schooled in the art of manipulation, and we now live in a world where women go on date after date with empty men who never leave them feeling fulfilled — pun intended. Sexless, bitter, bored, and frustrated, I sense that many women don’t even know what hit them over the last decade and a half. Ah, but the internet is still young.

These ideas that were established by the PUA movement seeped out into society at large as men extracted the information from the books and websites and then, like men do, used the tactics to show off for other men, often likely pretending that they made these “magical” discoveries by themselves. I continually see men falling back on these ideas that were bad to start with and getting frustrated when women don’t respond the way they were promised by some other dude. The cat is out of the bag and men all over have unwittingly participated in the largest failed experiment in the world of dating that history has ever seen. They truly believed they could take the Woman out of the sex and still have abundant sex with women. Porn culture didn’t help, I mean, they had examples of real-life men doing this that they’d seen with their own two eyes, what more evidence do you need?!

Women are tired of peacocking, even if they’re unaware of what it is. They might not be able to verbalize it, but I can assure you, they hate it. They know when a guy is telling them several times in a conversation how many times a week he goes to a gym or when he’s strutting around in bizarre and unorthodox clothing so that everyone in the room notices him, and, when they don’t, he manspreads to make sure all of the women see who he really is — an asshole. They sigh when we’re not around, they complain that they can’t find a decent guy who isn’t spewing complete bullshit all the time. They’re tired of dating men whose entire foundations are based on carefully-crafted lies and a fraudulent image. They’re tired of men without substance. And, before any guy gets up in arms with me and says that women wear make-up and thus were the real “tricksters” I suggest asking women how they really feel about the perceived compulsion that they wear make-up…or else.. I also can say that women tend to have a lot of substance, in our culture. Men, on the other hand, are tired of peacocking not working for them and have basically just changed form, shapeshifting into much of the modern alt-right and INCEL movements.

Ironic, isn’t it? That the whole goal was to attract women and, in doing so, men managed to figure out a way to repel them. Peacocking is just bad form and we shouldn’t be doing it. It’s essentially little more than concentrated sex repellent — warning: contents under pressure. This toxic mix of masculine biohazard comes in a volatile explosive can which can erupt suddenly when pressed or even rubbed the wrong way. Keep out of reach of children.

So, how about this, gentlemen…how about we embrace substance? How about we nurture our inner selves a bit more? What if we began taking up philosophy courses, not to become something but to understand it? I mean, Aristotle said that knowledge was valuable for knowledge’s sake, what’s the harm in giving it a shot, entire collections of brilliant people are available in e-book format for $1. What about medieval poetry? What could you adopt from these things that might make your life better? What could you learn from listening to these other people and cultures as varied as the world? And, what about working on ourselves and learning to become more understanding, patient, empathetic, and prudent? What about being responsible? What about cleaning up our credit or smiling and holding doors? What about making small talk without the expectation of sex attached? What about not demanding sex? What about not being nice as if we deserve sex in return for basic and commonplace decency? As I often say, I’m unsurprised that such movements sprouted up, it seems the logical consequence of our consumer culture, with our dating lives tending to reflect the dominant values of the culture, and peacocking basically being nothing more than turning ourselves into walking billboards selling our fraudulent brand. This is not what women want, this is not what anyone wants. Nobody wants to date a lie, no matter how beautiful.

It’s a new year, a new decade, can we please leave peacocking in the years gone by, relinquishing it to the dustbin of history, along with other failed ideas like Neoconservativism and Reaganomics? Trickle-down, anyone? I think we should. Peacocking certainly won’t work, anymore, anyways, and thus anyone who attempts to is wasting their time. In fact, women have countered our ruse with a strategy of their own: gentlemen, welcome to the Dickonomics of Tinder, where women get to unapologetically weed you out of their own personal dating pools at the slightest hint of toxic behavior and yes, peacocking. So how about we start being real again? I hesitate to use the term “real men” but, let’s face it, if there’s one thing that a real man must possess, “realness” is certainly at the very top of that list, my friends. Authenticity is more important than peacocking. Let’s embrace real conversations and meaningful dialogue, let’s embrace having ethical stances and worthwhile values, let’s embrace correcting the errors of our cumulative male ways by listening to women and proceeding from a framework that includes them and treats them like equals, rather than things to be manipulated out of sex and discarded. Peacocking is dead. Peacocking is dead, indeed, and we have killed it, but not before we’ve made a mockery out of ourselves with it.

The thing is, the Pickup Artist Movement had so much potential, if only it hadn’t have been run by a bunch of men who insisted that women become the uncomfortable, inhuman robots a-la The Stepford Wives, who would inevitably do their bidding as servants in the male’s fantasy-harem that he promised himself he would someday establish. All they had to do was listen and listen, they did not. Had it been a movement that listened to women and asked, “How can we better communicate with you and be better men for you?” it might have been something great. Had it been introspective, it might have done the world some good. They never took into consideration that sex is a two-way street and now men all over are paying the price for it. Now we must undo the damage that’s been wrought.