I Read A PUA Book And Learned How Rapists Think

he confessed to it in his book!

This is a picture of Nick Krauser in case you’re looking to have casual sex on your vacation in London and want to know whom to avoid.

The blogger issendai wrote about estranged parents’ forums. Normally, you only hear about abusive parents from their children’s point of view. Abusers don’t identify as abusers, so you can’t go to r/DestroyingChildrensSelfEsteem to get their perspective on the subject. But abusers do, often, identify as loving parents whose ungrateful children stopped talking to them for no reason—and so estranged parents’ forums offer insight into how abusers rationalize their own behavior.

The pickup manual Daygame Mastery, by Nick Krauser, is interesting for the same reason. Rapists don’t identify as rapists. But they sure do sometimes identify as pickup gurus.

To be clear, I’m not applying some arcane sex-positive feminist definition of rape that no normal person ever follows. Daygame Mastery contains the following passages:

Flag a taxi and then push her in. Tell the driver roughly where you are going but not the street address until you are nearly there. Probably half the girls just get in and accept what’s coming. The other half will give some token resistance by asking “Where are we going?”

Tell her “Disneyland, to see Mickey Mouse.”…

If she’s really resisting you have to let her get back out. A firm no will be very firm at this point. Any “no” that leaves wiggle room / indecision is just token. The stakes are so high now that if she doesn’t want to fuck, she’ll be very very clear about not wanting to be in the taxi.

• “It’s really late. I don’t know how I’ll get home.” = token

• “Your place? No, it’s too fast” = token

• “You are kidnapping me!” = token

• “I’m not going to your place” = depends on the tone and body language

• “No” = a real hard no…

If she’s a bit of a bitch and has lots of slut tells, then you can try overruling her with dominance - tell her “Less of your disobedience missy, get in” and give her strong dominant eyes. That’s a big risk but some girls will go for it. I’d only recommend this if you’re genuinely running out of time because nowhere else is open.

Consider it like a castle siege and your intent is the battering ram on the raised drawbridge. You’ll hammer on the door, shake it against its hinges, back up to regroup, and then hammer again.

I’d estimate over half my lays have resistance and it’s obvious why: I’m shooting for girls at the upper-edge of what is possible in quality, I’m getting inexperienced girls, and I’m rushing them to sex on my timetable (which is far faster than their preferred timetable). So resistance is inevitable. And futile.

These moments [after a woman says “no” or “stop”] require expert calibration and are not for beginners. If you’ve banged less than 40 women, don’t even try them. When a girl is giving stubborn resistance at a particular moment, try:

• Put your finger over her lips, look sternly into her eyes, and say “shhhhh.”

• Grab her wrists and pin them over her head. Hold firmly but, crucially, give her enough wiggle room that if she really wanted to escape she could do it.

• Grab her neck so that her fingers slightly press into her arteries but the palm doesn’t put much pressure onto her windpipe. This is very dominant but not painful. Examine her eyes. Is she showing fear (bad, release her) or excitement (good, keep your hand there).

Get used to the idea of wrestling a girl into submission. Watch the sex scene in Conan the Barbarian where Arnie has to tame a hellcat woman. You aren’t really putting her into a powerless position, you are merely simulating it.

So what does Daygame Mastery suggest about the psychology of serial rapists?

They Think Women Are Actually Consenting

In the above passage, Krauser describes forcibly holding down a woman who has told you that she doesn’t want sex in order to force her to have sex with you. But at no point does he describe it as rape. From Krauser’s perspective, he is simply engaging in unnegotiated, safewordless consensual nonconsent play with a woman he met a week ago.

I don’t mean that this is “a misunderstanding.” As a sexually active adult, you are expected to know not to have unnegotiated, safewordless consensual nonconsent play with near-strangers. Krauser is innocent in the same sense that someone is innocent if they unload six shots into someone else’s back and then claim that they didn’t know that guns kill people.

Key to Krauser’s rationalizations is that there is some way a woman can communicate that she really doesn’t want sex. If she really tries, she could escape, so she’s consenting. Never mind that many people—particularly people without self-defense or martial arts training—freeze up in violent situations; never mind that Krauser might have misjudged how much force he was using; never mind that she might give in, fearing that if she provokes a violent man by resisting he might escalate to further violence or even murder. There is something the woman could do that counts as nonconsent, so Krauser isn’t a rapist.

Similarly, Krauser talks about the importance of calibration, of being able to see the fear in her eyes. It doesn’t occur to Krauser that a man might do some dickful thinking about whether he sees fear or excitement; it doesn’t occur to Krauser that people misread each other’s body language all the time; it doesn’t occur to Krauser that a woman might be turned on and still not want to have sex. If a woman conveys to Krauser telepathically that she doesn’t consent, then he will totally pay attention to it! So: not a rapist.

Similarly, Krauser puts great store on distinguishing real nos from fake nos. There exists a magic passphrase that will cause Krauser not to shove a woman into a taxi against her will. If she hasn’t stumbled on the magic passphrase, then she must have not really wanted to leave. Normally here I’d talk about hard nos and soft nos and the fact that people often politely give an excuse because they don’t want to be confrontational, but “you’re kidnapping me” and “I don’t want to go to your place” are both pretty hard nos! There’s literally just a secret code!

Some of Krauser’s coercive tactics are even justified as a way of seeking consent. For example, Krauser suggests responding to a hard no by icing the woman out completely and leaving the room. Part of his reasoning is that you’re showing her she isn’t trapped here—if you’re in a different room, she can leave whenever she wants. Nice thought, I guess?

If It Isn’t ‘Real’ Rape, It’s Fine

Krauser only recommends outright violently forcing women into sex if you have had more than forty sexual partners. But, to Krauser, anything up to violent force is fair game.

After he says that icing women out lets them know they can leave, Krauser says:

You have temporarily withdrawn your attention. A girl has a limited numbers of times she can rebuff you before you drop her completely. She's skating on thin ice now.

Abruptly ending an intimate interaction (of any kind, not just sexual) is a very harsh form of social punishment. Krauser knows this. It’s why he recommends it.

Similarly, Krauser writes:

Be relentless in your determination to break down those final barriers… Don't pay attention to whatever rationalisations come out of her mouth:

“I should go home”

“This is too fast”

“We shouldn’t be doing this”

Ignore anything that isn’t a clear “No” or “Stop.”

In many jurisdictions, it doesn’t legally qualify as rape to continuing to try to undress someone who says a soft no like “I should go home.”¹ Indeed—and I’m going to be kicked out of feminism for saying this—in the context of a loving, trusting relationship with someone you know well, it can be fine to sometimes ignore this kind of soft no. You have to know someone well enough to tell apart “mmm, I really should go work~*~” from “I have a deadline and I’m not feeling sexy, go away.”

But, fundamentally, a non-rapist doesn’t want sex with people who don’t want to have sex with them. If someone you met a few days ago says “this is too fast, we shouldn’t be doing this,” the safe way to bet is that they don’t want sex with you. If you have sex with them anyway, it might not be felony rape, but you’re still having sex with someone who doesn’t want to be there.

Krauser doesn’t have a higher standard for his sex life than “depending on where you live, you might not be committing a felony.” He is trying to push as closely as possible to the line of committing rape, without quite getting over it. As I wrote about Neil Gaiman:

A man doesn’t care about the experiences of his sexual partners. He acts out a script that gets him off, with the person he’s having sex with as a masturbatory aid. It doesn’t matter to him whether they like it, any more than it matters if a vibrator or a Fleshlight likes it. To get sex whenever he wants, he gets as close as he can to the rape line while technically not raping anyone. Because he is rich, powerful, and famous, he gets away with it. Eventually, he misjudges the line and commits rape.

You’ve heard this story before. Rapists aren’t very original people.

I do think this mindset leads to violent rape. When a man who thinks this way is horny and she keeps giving soft nos and he can see in her eyes that she “really” “wants” “it”, it’s tempting to hold her down and force the issue. You’ve had sex with thirty women, that’s practically forty. You’re calibrated, right? She just wants unnegotiated consensual nonconsent play, as women often do.

If A Woman Is At Home Alone With You, She Wants Sex

Let me provide more context to the quote about castles:

Consider it like a castle siege and your intent is the battering ram on the raised drawbridge. You’ll hammer on the door, shake it against its hinges, back up to regroup, and then hammer again.

This may originally sound “dark” but consider the subtext. She came to your room knowing full well you’ll try to fuck her. You are currently trying to fuck her. …And she’s still not trying to leave.

Krauser hammers on this point as hard as he hammers on a woman’s boundaries. As long as she’s physically present in the same location as you, she’s consenting to sex. (He does emphasize that this is only true if you’ve kissed her first. Con… sent…?) Never mind that she might want to talk to you in private without having sex, or that she might want to kiss a bit and then go home, or that she didn’t know where the taxi was going.

This is a very convenient belief for Krauser. It means that any time you’re in a situation where you could conceivably have sex with a woman, she’s consenting to sex with you. The nonconsenting women are all changing diapers or going to the DMV or at home alone reading romantasy, or otherwise completely out of commission. Therefore, anything Krauser does to get her to have sex with him is justified by the simple fact that it is possible for him to do it.

Women Like To Be Raped

So why do women do this? Why do women keep saying things like “I don’t want sex” and “wait a bit” and “I just wanted to kiss,” if they secretly want you to fuck them whenever you’re alone together?

Krauser provides three reasons:

1. Women want to know that they could keep a particular man. Once she has sex with a man, he’ll stop chasing her just to get into her vagina, and she’ll discover whether she had the personality and beauty to keep him around for a second go. Getting dumped after sex is a crushing rejection for a woman, so she’s motivated to avoid it.²

2. Women don’t want to think of themselves as sluts. If they protest and say that they didn’t want it, then they bear no responsibility. It “just happened.”

3. Women like dominant, masculine men who lead the interaction and get what they want. Therefore, women put up fake resistance in order to have the thrill of being taken.

#2 and #3 are explanations for why you’re doing women a favor by forcing them into sex.

This synthesizes the previous points. In Krauser’s world, all women know the secret code of how to say that they don’t want sex. Women who say they don’t want sex, but don’t use the code, are trying to initiate kinky sex. As long as you stay on the right side of the ‘legally rape’ line (at least if you have fewer than forty sexual partners), you can safely do whatever you want, knowing she’s secretly gagging for it.

To be sure, some women think like #2, #3, or both. Chesed has an excellent blog post talking about how she sought out sex with rapey men in college; I recommend reading it for an explanation, full of both empathy and accountability, for why someone would. But Krauser believes:

1. Women who think like that are much more common than they actually are, such that you can safely assume that any resistance comes from someone who wants unnegotiated consensual nonconsent play.

2. You ought to give women like that what they want, instead of punishing them for their poor communication skills by not having sex with them.

Here we see the real danger of the Nice Guy/Asshole binary that pervades manosphere thought. As I wrote in the first part of this review:

Either you supplicate to women, desperately trying to seek their approval through presents and praise and bootlicking, eagerly grateful for everything you get—or you’re an asshole.

If you believe in this binary, it seems natural that, if women don’t want a bootlicking people pleaser, they must want to be raped. Those are, after all, the two Kinds Of Guy. Could a woman want a man who sets boundaries and has relationship standards—perhaps even (gasp) an assertive, decisive, masculine man—and also want to be able to refuse sex and have her decision respected? Impossible! Women want such self-contradictory things!

If A Woman Goes Home With You, You Deserve Sex

And then we get into the passage where Krauser says the quiet part loud:

There’s not a girl in the world who goes home alone with a man without understanding the implicit agreement that sex will happen. So if she then refuses sex she is breaking the agreement. She’s being a cunt.

So treat her like a cunt. You can’t force her to have sex but you can withdraw every scrap of attention and validation you ever gave her. It’s a similar principle to demanding a receipt for counterfeit goods. The nice guy will respect her principles, accept a woman’s prerogative is to change her mind, that no means no and so on while inside he’s burning with rage and injustice. This is inauthentic behavior…

Therefore, an attractive man will throw her out of the house. He won’t call a taxi, he won’t placate and validate her feelings. He’ll carefully control his anger and say “Get out of my house.”

You see, a woman being alone in a man’s house isn’t just a sign that she consents. It’s a binding agreement.³

If a woman goes home with a man, he’s entitled to sex. If she decides not to have sex with him, she’s wronging him. She’s lying, breaking her word, committing fraud. He’s a victim.

Notice how it doesn’t even occur to Krauser that a man might be rejected sexually and not burn with rage and injustice. There are two kinds of men: the kind who authentically kick a woman out, and the kind who inauthentically pretend to be chill. It is incomprehensible to Krauser that a man might actually be chill—that he might feel some mild disappointment, shrug, and say “cool, let’s cuddle.”

An essay I regularly return to is Thomas MacAuley Millar’s Toward a Performance Model of Sex. Millar points out that many people see sex as a commodity: something women have and men want, that men bargain for from women. In this system, rape is essentially a property crime: you took a good without the owner signing a contract first. Millar argues that sex is, instead, a mutually pleasurable activity,⁴ similar to musicians jamming together:

Forcing participation through coercion in a commodity model is a property crime, but in a performance model it is a disturbing and invasive crime of violence, a kind of kidnapping. Imagine someone forcing another, at gunpoint, to play music with him… The fact that it is musical would not in any way distract from the fact that it was forced, and sensible people might scratch our heads at how strange it is for someone to want to play music with an unwilling partner. Certainly, nobody would discount the coercion merely because the musician performing at gunpoint played music with other people, or even with the assailant before, which is an argument rape apologists make regularly when the subject is sex instead of music. B. B. King has played with everybody, but no one would argue that he asked for it if someone kidnapped him and made him cut a demo tape with a garage band of strangers.

Krauser embraces the commodity model. Like most people who embrace the commodity model, he outright says it: withdrawing your attention from a woman who doesn’t want to have sex with you is like demanding a receipt for counterfeit goods. To Krauser, a woman who comes over to your house turning down sex is the same as someone signing a contract to deliver wood and then refusing to deliver the wood. You can’t command specific performance but you can absolutely refuse to pay them (in validation).

From a performance/activity model, this behavior is not so much morally wrong as profoundly confusing. I don’t make people have sex with me. I also don’t make them watch movies with me, sing with me, play in my tabletop RPGs, or participate in danmei book clubs. All of these activities are only fun if everyone involved wants to be there. If someone is sitting there zoning out and going “uh… I got a 12” when prompted, I might as well stay home and play with Claude. What is Krauser even getting out of sex?

Well…

Sex Is A Game Of Vagina Clicker

Nick Krauser describes his approach to having sex:

1. Put some music on and make small talk for a couple of minutes while sipping a drink.

2. Pull her to her feet and kiss, let your hands roam her curves as she lets her hands wander.

3. Go “hard” by suddenly kissing her hard, pulling on the hair at the base of her neck, squeezing her ass, and pulling her into you with a vice-like grasp.

4. Mash her breasts a bit, kiss and bite her neck. She should be matching you in intensity by now and moaning.

5. Pick her up over the shoulder (I normally do a fireman’s carry or a double-leg). She should gasp and giggle.

6. Carry her to the bed or sofa. Dump her roughly onto it. Again she should show a flash of sexual excitement.

7. Get on top and kiss her hard for another minute. Work your thigh in-between her legs so your quads are pressing onto her pussy and she is hooking a leg around yours.

8. Put a palm on the front of her hip-bone, squeeze your fingers into the flesh like grabbing a handle and push down hard to pin her hips to the mattress.

9. Pull her shirt off. Match it by taking off your t-shirt.

10. Stand up and take your trousers and socks off. Usually I’ll make this light-hearted by having some childish boxer shorts (e.g. Mr Potato Head) and shaking my ass to the music like a male stripper. This lightens the mood for the big play…

11. Get on top again. Unfasten her trousers and then yank them down. If you get no resistance then immediately remove her panties and put a condom on then go for it. If you do get resistance… kiss her more, put a condom on in full view of her, then push her panties out of the way as you put your dick in.

If I were as bad at sex as Nick Krauser, wild horses could not drag this fact out of me. Even if you are boring and goal-directed and never once have kissed a shoulder or a nose, you could just write that you did! It’s a book! You can make things up! There is just no amount of money you could pay me to get me to say “I don’t touch breasts after the bra comes off, and before it does I mash them. You know, like you do to a potato? Yeah, that’s me with a tit.” If someone pointed a gun to my head and said “I will let you go if you say that you never touch girls’ clits the first time you have sex with them,” I would die with my honor intact.

But Krauser put this passage in his book! His book was self-published, so there wasn’t even an editor saying “I know, I know, but we just got the numbers in from marketing and if you make it clear you’re horrible in bed and therefore #relatable we can peel off some of the misogynists from the Andrew Tate demographic.” He thought this was a good thing to write in his book about how to get women to want to have sex with you.

Presumably he doesn’t tell girls his writing pseudonym so there’s no risk they’ll read his book and realize how bad the sex is going to be.

Now, it’s not clear that Krauser is as bad at sex as an autistically literal-minded reading of this passage would suggest. It’s true that he’s specifically describing when to grip her hipbone and when to take off your socks, but perhaps he left out all the kissing and biting and breast-mashing that’s supposed to happen in the second half of the sex. However, I will point out that, unless we’re really stretching the definition of the word “immediately”, there’s no point where clit-touching could reasonably go. Again: wild horses, death with honor.

Daygame involves an exhausting amount of work: Krauser estimates that even a one-night stand takes him six or seven hours from meet to fuck, and that’s not counting the hours spent approaching uninterested women on the street. His reward for all this—by his own testimony—is five minutes of dry, awkward sex. Maybe twenty, if you’re very generous about adding in additional breast-mashing. He doesn’t want to make her come; he doesn’t want to kiss her and touch her and have her touch him; as far as I can tell, the same experience could be had, at much less expense, through buying Pornhub Premium and a Fleshlight.

Except it can’t, can it, because—

If you’re at this level [high-level daygame], you’ve likely become friends with some of the best local players and you swap war stories. You can’t wait to send the +1 text to your buddies. This will lead to some healthy competition as your friends egg you on. You’ll refine your game by discussing theories and watching each other work. That’s the upside. The downside is that crushing envy when you’re the recipient of the +1 text. Don’t deny it. Your first thought is “bastard!”

—everything is about sex, except for sex, which is about ego validation and Number Go Up.⁵

The purpose of daygame, for Krauser, isn’t having hot sex with hot women. The purpose of daygame is playing Vagina Clicker.

Krauser writes:

Your brain is not designed to absorb the dopamine of twenty sexually charged streets sets in one day. That never existed on the African savannah. You aren’t designed to date three women in one day, nursing a boner as you try to figure out the subtle psychological plays that will let you stick it into her. You aren’t designed to have three girls on a rotation. You aren’t designed to get the post-fuck new-girl dopamine spike twenty-plus times a year. But we are designed to strive for it, like dogs chasing a car. And the dog has no idea what it’ll do when it finally catches a car…

Like all addictions, your physiology changes to require more stimulus for each successive reward. For daygamers this means you trend towards:

• Faster, grottier lays, for the excitement

• Hotter or less attainable women, for the challenge

• Silly targets, such as a one-hour same day lay

Normal patient daygame is no longer satisfying. It’s become humdrum and routine. You can understand why the Rolling Stones became so listless and abused drugs - several years of unlimited easy access to groupie pussy left their dopamine receptors fried and stripped all the meaning out of life. Banging so many girls so often drains you of testosterone. Without that you have no spark to achieve. There are few men alive who wouldn’t look at the Rolling Stones afterparties and think “I want that!” but it carries a deep cost.

In my life, I have been privileged to know many straight cis male sluts. Indeed, one of my housemates is one. None of them feel like this.

To Krauser, sex is a commodity women have and men want. He got really good at getting women to give him their commodity very cheaply. Now he has a giant pile of commodities surrounding him. He feels elated and proud when he has more commodities than other men; he feels envious and miserable when other men have more commodities than him. But at least he can be proud that he has a high score!

…except he isn’t. I’m not making up some kind of moralistic story here; it’s there on the page, in black and white. Krauser thought getting a high score would make him happy. But now that he has one, it feels empty and meaningless.

Of course it does. His life’s work is having boring orgasms with people he doesn’t like.

Contrast a happy straight male slut. He gets along with women, particularly slutty women.⁶ He thinks sex is a fun activity to do together with people who are also having a good time. He hasn’t optimized everything pleasurable out of sex in pursuit of a +1 text. His partners often have orgasms. He doesn’t care if someone else has more sexual partners than him, because it’s not a competition. He isn’t drained of his sense of meaning and his drive to achieve, because he found meaning somewhere other than winning Vagina Clicker. Sex is recreation, not his sense of purpose.

It’s normal for a cis straight man to begin his slut career searching primarily for validation, especially if he grew up socially awkward and nerdy. Holy shit, women want to fuck me! I can talk to a hot girl, and then she wants to put my dick in her pussy! I can do all the kinky shit I never thought anyone did in real life! Nothing wrong with that. But at some point he gets used to the idea that he can get laid. If it was always just about ego validation, he moves on and does something else with his life.⁷ The guys who continue to have a lot of casual sex like women and like sex.

The best argument in favor of choosing to be an ethical slut instead of a pickup artist is reading their respective books.

I’m not sure how common this particular thought process is among undetected rapists. I think the other beliefs I outlined are common, but I wouldn’t be surprised if rapey pickup artists are more likely than other rapists to play Vagina Clicker. I don’t expect all rapists to be making decisions that make them miserable; the world isn’t that convenient.

But the cliche sex-positive feminist “yes means yes” is true, at least for rapey pickup artists. Rape isn’t an isolated problem unrelated to the rapist’s other beliefs. Fundamentally, rapists want something out of sex other than everyone involved having a good time. Pleasure and anti-rape activism aren’t opposed; they’re opposite sides of the same coin.

1. For example, in the United States, rape generally requires that the victim experience force, a threat, or duress of some kind, or that the victim be unable to consent for some reason (e.g. drugged, underage, unaware of the perpetrator’s true identity). Krauser is from England, and in England all sex without consent is considered to be legally rape.

2. This seems wack to me. As best as I can tell, one of the most serious problems any slutty woman faces is getting men to go away after casual sex instead of mooning around making soppy Spotify playlists and doodling your name on work paperwork. Maybe it’s more true if you’re inexperienced women’s exciting vacation fling instead of sleeping with a real slut.

3. Apparently one that isn’t invalidated by the fact that she didn’t know she was going to his house. Everyone in Krauserland is telepathic?

4. These are, of course, not the only two ways you can think about sex.

5. Joke stolen from my friend Ilzolende. My friend Kappa came up with the ‘Vagina Clicker’ description.

6. Trying to have lots of casual sex while thinking slutty women are disgusting bitches is one of the more confusing decisions pickup artists make.

7. Judging from my friend group, he either gets married and has kids or transitions into technical AI safety research, but I assume the latter is a selection effect.