The Human Mating Dance
And why you are doing it wrong. 18+
I like birbs and like to feed pigeons. When pigeons are fed, they start focusing on the other thing - mating.
Mated ("married") pigeons usually have a little ritual where the male feeds the female, before getting it on. Single pigeons on the other hand that are fed want to attract a mate, and to do this, they first do this little mating dance, where the male walks up to a female pigeon and coos and coos, doing a little swirl, one side, and then to the other side. If the female is already mated or just not interested, she’ll fly away, but to unmated female pigeons, that cooing and flustering and swirling might just be the most sexiest thing imaginable, and thus she first demands some food, and when she receives it and is satisfied with it (consider it a kiss in human terms) cowers, ready for the male to hop on.
This sometimes reminds me that I was planning to talk about the human mating dance for 15 fucking years now. Always finding one reason or another to procrastinate further, or trying to find some scholarly evidence that backs me up or that I'm wrong, and not everyone else. As if that ever happened. Seriously guys this shit isn't hard and I've been talking about it for 15 years, and nobody has done a proper study confirming it?
What is a Mating Dance?
When we are talking about a "mating dance", we are primarily talking about birbs. Almost all birbs do mating dances, and they differ greatly from species to species, they in fact serve to differentiate species. Birbs mate for life, once they mate, they are now a couple and have to do everything together, find a nest, feed each other, build a nest, forever.
For this very intimate and costly connection to successfully produce offspring, it is necessary for the birbs to be genetically compatible. If say a pigeon mated with a chicken, they'd be mated for life, would build a nest together and try to raise babbos. Which wouldn't work because chickens and pigeons are genetically too different. Because many birbs look quite similar - a chicken might just appear as a particularly big pigeon to another pigeon - size generally being super sexy to birbs - the mating dance serves as a "genetic compatibility check" - it has to have the same instinctive mating dance imprinted in its genes.
A chicken cocks mating dance primarily involves walking around the hen scratching with its feet, rather than swirling in place like a pigeon does. This wrong mating would cause a targeted pigeon hen to get the "ick" - And with the pigeon not reacting correctly itself, the same happens in the chicken cock. Now they might fight or just avoid each other.
The first most important part to understand about the mating dance is, that it is strictly different for each species. Only if the mating dance is performed correctly by both, for each others idiosyncratic, genetic mating dance expectation, both birbs will mate - consider the mating itself to be the final part of the mating dance. Look up some birb mating dances on youtube, they're quite cute.
Now the next most important part about the mating dances is, that they are highly gendered. In some birb species, they will ostensibly do the same movements at some point, but that is only a part of a greater mating dance and usually means one is following the other. The mating dance means different steps for each sex. Otherwise birbs would regularly accidentally mate into homosexual-for-life matedness, having even worse chances for viable offspring than cross-species mating. Meaning, you cannot describe the mating dance as "only one of them does something" - it is a dance for two.
Now I’ve been talking about birds a lot, and you might wonder, well what does that have to do with humans? I just told you, it’s the two aspects of the mating dance that have to be understood: The generation of the Ick, and the extremely gendered nature of the dance, and how both of these parts are evolutionarily adaptive, necessary even.
Talk About Humans Already!
I'll get to that. First, we'll have to talk about the proposed mating dance that you've probably already heard. It works something like this:
Boomer Mating Dance
Male version: You are a man. You see a nice girl. You ask her out. You go see a movie or something, have some conversation, then sleep on it. If you still like her, you ask her for a second date. For this second date you should probably acquire a nice gift, showing off your wealth. If she is impressed by your gift she will agree to netflix & chill following whatever date was planned.
Female version: You dress up and put on makeup to maximize the chances a nice boy asks you out. If he does you reject him or accept his invitation. You get to know him over the course of a date, then sleep on it. Not with him. What are you, some kind of hussy? Later he'll ask you for another date if he still likes you. You go with him on a second date to get to know him a little better, but don't have sex with him, hey, stop, I said no, wait until the third - Dammit is it really so hard to keep your legs together?
There's an even bigger boomerism, the baseball metaphor: First base, kissing, second base, groping, third base, blowjob, fourth base is full on penetrative sex. This is itself a pretty tight mating dance instruction. Don't grope the tits before you've kissed. Do suck dick. Very american. Very focused on male proactiveness.
It wasn't always like that
The concept of the "receptive" female and the "proactive" male stems from Charles Darwin himself. In his book, 1871s "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex", he presents male-female relations as universally one of female receptiveness, and male proactiveness. He emphasizes that men stand in competition with each other, where basically the biggest monkey then claims the most beautiful wife (or wives), whereas women do not compete at all because they want to invest all of their energy into their offspring and let the men do the selection, based on health and fertility.
The more modern evopsych rationalization is that sperm is cheap, and eggs are expensive, and thus women are hyper-picky, while men want sex all the time with everything everywhere.
This being Charles Motherfucking Darwin and SCIENCE we are talking about here, this idea of humans as a species where selection and courtship only happens from men, became more and more popular in the intellectual circles during the late 1800s, portraying virile, proactive men that DID THINGS, but the common folk in the west up until the 1950ies had a different idea of how that all works. Their views on gender relations were informed not from fancy science books, but from the Bible, and old greek plays.
How does the bible, for example, portray women? As horny animals, basically, who have nothing on their mind other than seducing good and virtuous men. The Bible even contains pretty straight forward instruction on how to seduce a man: Feed him, get him drunk, then when he lies down, you dash for the crotch! All yours baby. (Genesis 19:32) The bible is full of stories of (usually wicked) women using various seduction techniques to lure and entice men. Men do not ever "seduce" in the bible. At most, they rape.
To our modern sensibilities, we can rationalize such things as it being archaic and misogynist or whatever, because modern Evolutionary Psychology tells us that it’s men who are the sex obsessed braindead idiots, and women are gentle angels who do not want to get intimate with anyone except for their true love (i.e. hypergamy, the highest status guy they can get their hands on) Now if that’s not science, I don’t know what science is!
Of course, the view of women as horny animals, constantly and actively trying seduce men, is not just incidental, but essentially universal before darwin. It is the view in Islam, where "denying a wife sex" is considered a punishment. It is the view of ancient greece, where in comedic plays such as Lysistrata where the idea of women withholding sex is held as comically absurd, and in the play "Thesmophoriazusae" (take THAT, spell checker) discusses how women use seduction to gain political power. And a cursory glance at even vedic and chinese texts see "seduction" as something that a woman does, not a man.
The anomaly is the modern west
Globally and historically speaking, it seems to be our modern west, who is the outlier, who believes that men are the sexually proactive ones.
Figuring out definitely whether our modern culture has got it wrong, or the ancient texts, has led me to a lot of field testing, and I can say with absolute certainty: The bible was right on this one. Women are obsessed with sex in ways men can’t even fathom. And seduction, the mating dance, is 100% led by the woman.
So why am I telling you all of this? To tell you that not only is the way most people think about the human courtship behavior is wrong, I am also telling you why people believe in this wrong thing, specifically, where this belief comes from. We've subscribed to Darwins view of sexually passive women, and in doing so, have completely lost track how the human mating dance actually works.
MEN, DON'T HIT ON WOMEN
If your brainspace is very crowded and you can only remember one thing, this should be it:
MEN, DO NOT APPROACH WOMEN.
I know that’s what the pick-up artists tell you, or maybe your dad or your mom or your friendzoned ladyfriends, but you have to stop this. Do not hit on women. Do not approach them. Let them approach you. In the human mating dance, initiating contact is the job of the woman. Hammer this into your brain.
Conversely, if you are a woman looking for "seduction advice", that's going to be a different article. I'm not a woman and I have very little practical experience seducing men. Which is part of the reason why I've been hesitant for 15 years to write this.
But to put it simple: Women are the proactive gender when it comes to the mating dance. Women do the approaching. Women do the initiations, women do the escalations. The job of a man in the context of the mating dance is to reject or reciprocate.
It is women who are built to do the contact initiation. They are small, cute, have childlike voices, not threatening. People like being approached by a woman. Contrastingly, being approached by a man, means being approached by a 8 tall foot human bulldozer, bred for millions of years of evolution to be the most efficient killer around. That is a physical threat! At least from the perspective of the average woman.
If you have ever professionally approached people, like, collected signatures for a petition or anything, the way it works is you set up your stall somewhere and then you approach people passing by. And for this job, anyone who can afford it, will use women, and ideally the prettiest, cutest girls they can find. Because the reaction, the success rate, is just so much better than when men do it. Men might as well just stay in the background, fetch coffee and such, for the girls that are getting all the signatures.
And there’s more evidence to back up that women are the ones supposed to initiate contact. Sociologists who filmed test subjects in a party setting recorded who approached whom. They found that women approaching men had orders of magnitude better success rates than vice versa, had much better chances of going home with a man they successfully approached than vice versa. Interestingly though, when interviewed in the debrief, a significant portion of the newly formed couples would still argue that it was the man who initiated contact, despite video evidence to the contrary. This is how deeply ingrained this faulty expectation of the male initiating contact is. Even when it literally happens to them, they don't see it, and defer to the cultural expectation of the initiating man.
So what happens when, instead, a male is initiating contact with a woman? An “Ick” reaction. Because this is a violation of the mating dance. That’s the biological instinct telling you somethings wrong. Women describe guys who hit on a lot of women as “creepy” for that reason. They are creepy and icky because they are doing the mating dance wrong. If you are one of those guys who uses the "Shotgun approach", all you've achieved is giving a lot of chicks the ick.
But how does it work?
I apologize if it now gets technical, because I have to use words to describe things that happen quite naturally.
It has to be noted first, that humans are not birds. Our "Mating dance" is more like a set of principles, rather than the tightly choreographed interactions of birbs.
Second, the exact steps of the mating dance actually differ from culture to culture, a well studied example being american GIs and french women during world war 2, where the american GIs would resort to “french” kissing much earlier than the french would, AKA “first base” which to the french was one of the lasts steps before actual sex. To the french women, the GIs skipped a large portion of their accustomed mating dance, specifically the fondling which they would do before kissing, to the step right before sex, and so they felt they were a bit too forward. And yet to the GIs, who expected kissing to be quite early in an encounter, the french girls would immediately move on to the sausage and hotdog part, thinking the french girls were quite forward instead.
I can speculate about the reason for this: American movies of the 1930ies had the Hays code, and were allowed to show kissing, but no lewd touching, which in other cultures almost always precedes oral contact. Because kissing became a stand-in for all manner of lewd action, it became culturally normalized to kiss early.
But in the most abstract sense, we can identify 5 major "layers" of the mating dance
Visual, that is seeing each other, eye contact, all the way up to suggestive winks
Verbal, that is speaking to each other,
Tactile, that is, touching each other, from shaking hands to hugs to going on under-the-clothes-adventures
Oral, that is kissing, from a shy peck on the cheek, to steamy making out
Genital, that is, well, you know.
After initiation, the mating dance turns into a game of escalation, reciprocation, and rejection. Initiation is when you start the contact, reciprocation is when the level of contact offered is accepted, so if someone says “Hi how r u” you respond with “fine, u” instead of “fuck off” which would be a rejection, and once a baseline of contact is established, it can be escalated, so instead of talking about the weather you start talking about your reproductive needs, or a handshake can escalate into a hug. All of these go in parallel and simultaneously.
But again, the escalation has to be done by the woman, and follow a measured ladder of escalations. If a woman gropes your crotch without much early, that's to early, and will give you the ick. Conversely, if you escalate to boob grabbage without there being a lot of less-severe groping beforehand, you will cause the ick. It's a dance, a back and forth, but the woman has to lead, and the man simply has to follow for it to succeed.
Special advice for Americans: You can wait with the face sucking until you have some intimate touching going on, seriously.
And just as a woman would tease a man into touching her bum, a man should also playfully reject occasionally and teasingly.
Failures
Men initiating/escalating aggressively leads to the woman feeling under attack rather than aroused. Luckily, a slew of laws and cultural attitudes in the west prevent this for the most part, so men are actually quite unlikely to make this mistake these days. The #1 mistake is you hiding in the basement, not exposing yourself to women who might take a liking to you and approach you.
Women remaining passive however is the most common mistake. When it comes to the game of seduction, men are the prey, women are the hunters. As a woman on the prowl, you should never be passive. Wear gaudy clothes. Chat up people. Touch them if they might be comfortable with it. Escalate softly for both to remain inside their comfort zone.
Conversely, stop shaming other women for being sexually aggressive. They're women, they don't have much else going on! Have you seen womens magazines? They're all gossip about who else has sex, how to get sex, how to dress to get sex, and who has sex the most. Don't subject them to reading this trite crap, just let them have sex instead.
But, but, but!
Guy: "Women don't approach!" - They do constantly, but they use plausible deniability to make it look they just wanted a light for their smoke for example. You simply aren't noticing it, or you are hiding in a basement where they physically can't.
Girl: "Won't being forward like that make me look like a slut?" - Yes, and that's a good thing. Other women will hate you for the ease with which you can wrap men around the finger
Guy: "You're just telling me not to hit on girls because you want them all for yourself, evil selfish Chad you!" - I am the good kind of Chad who tells you how to positively interact with girls. Make yourself presentable and approachable and give women opportunity to approach.
Girl: "Nooo if I hit on a guy he'll think I'm some kind of whore!" - If you are doing it right, do the teasing, give heat, he'll be way too horny to be bothered by that. Making a guy horny for you is the single best skill you can learn - even, and especially, in a stable monogamous long term relationship. The failure of women to initiate and give heat, instead somehow expecting men to be "always horny brutes", is one of the biggest sexual problems in modern relationships.
Guy: "You must be really good looking for women to approach you" - That's true, but I also obviously tried approaching women with disastrous results - Looks don't help you, when you're doing the mating dance wrong. I became soon aware of the actual mechanics, of course, because I'm not just handsome but also a mega genius, and noticed that literally every single time I hit it off with a girl, it was her approaching me first. Although I had to occasionally push a little to move dance further.