Recently on the Hypnosis Technique Exchange HypnosisTechniqueExchange there was a question about Speed Seduction and whether it works. One of the immediate responses was that it crosses the line of ethics and if it were to work it would constitute rape and that someone who uses it could end up in jail. For those unfamiliar with Speed Seduction, it is an influence system developed by Ross Jeffries which combines elements of Neurolinguistic Programming with conversational Ericksonian style hypnosis specifically to increase the success rates for men who want to meet and get to know women intimately. Specifically, it is advertised with slogals such as "Get Laid within Ten Minutes" and the like. I have written on seduction systems in the past on this blog so feel free to go to the archives (Build Your Own Hypnotic Seduction System, How do Stage Hypnotists Zap Subjects so Fast?, Hypnosis for Increasing Erotic Sensitivity and Response, and others).

While I personally agree with some of the sentiment that many so-called speed seducers are aiming for manipulation, I believe the idea of it being a form of aggressive rape are off the mark here.

Speed Seduction in no way would be equal to rape. No more than any other influence strategy would be rape.

Speed Seduction is about creating mindsets. Yes, a large part of the market that is appeals to is guys who have low interpersonal skills who are seeking a way to get laid and then walk away (the terminology can be incredibly annoying in that respect) . . . however, Speed Seduction in and of itself is not inherently a rape strategy. Heck, it’s not even a coercion strategy.

The person who asked about the products needs to find out for himself though. You can get the original text by Ross Jeffries and a lot of the old newsletters online just by doing a simple web search. I believe Ross released the first book as a free download some time ago (there are html versions floating all over the place . . . the folks at fastseduction.com can probably point one towards it).

So, you can just look at that material and judge for yourself. Now, of course, the current material is different . . . at least I’m told it is more advanced, I’ve not looked at any of it in quite some time. There are also a number of interviews with Ross Jeffries thathave appeared in mainstream magazines. Quite often he does a series of walkups with the reporter observing. I have noted that the interviews with such walkups tend to be less favorable than the ones without (a few have poked fun at his non-success in these circumstances where he isn’t able to get a phone number let alone a "get laid fast" success . . . one article writer was quite offended that he kept trying to use the patterns on her and she was very put off by him while another article had him posing with two hot models with a caption that one of the girls got so fed up with how creepy and grabby he was that she stormed out of the shoot early). There are a couple glowing reviews out there as well, although I’ve not seen many in mainstream magazines (could someone who keeps tabs on this stuff post some links?).

Do a search and find both the positive and the negative reviews . . . but also look at the material that he does have available publicly and then try some of it out and notice your reaction to the approach. Get feedback and then make up your own mind as to whether the material or the approach is appropriate to your personality and your needs . . . what is the outcome you really want and will this help you get it?

As to the view that it is harmful . . . in and of itself, it is not. Seduction is actually a very positive thing. It’s part of how we function as humans. Since seduction in and of itself is about creating emotional responses . . . one could say that even an unschooled influencer does that when they try to create a mood for romance by dimming the lights and putting out the candles and turning on the stereo with an old worn copy of Bolero playing softly in the background . . . seduction is not about coercion, it’s about the emotional dance of human animals . . .

True seduction is about subtle moves, both ways, and is truly only successful when it is the other person who approaches and makes the overt move.

Seduction is about creating a context wherein the other person makes the sexual advance. This is not going to cause any rape charges. Sure, a partner may have second thoughts later . . . but in the end, seduction, speedy or otherwise, is about consent . . . if it is not consensual, it is not seduction.

As an experienced hypnotist, I am sure you are well aware that even when someone uses a formal induction they’re not going to be successful in coercing someone to have sex with them. Speed seduction, while it may at times be marketed in what appears to be a rather a creepy fashion, is even less coercive than formal hypnosis. It is, after all, conversational. A rape charge will not be successful. If such a case could be made, then we could start suing Bush and Kerry for their own influence strategies. Not going to happen.

If we find the speed seduction proponents distasteful, we need to . . . be careful in our conclusions . . . personal distaste is not the same as legal culpability. If it were, then there are a whole lot of politicians who would be putting even more folks in prison than are there now . . . and the gods know there are way too many folks in prison already.

One’s opinion that speed seduction may be aggressive is opinion and even then aggression is not rape. I would agree that much of it does come off as aggressive. A member of the techniques list rightfully pointed out that no one has been charged with
rape for using speed seduction is still correct and if it could be construed as rape, I believe it would not be a good thing as it implies that language itself is enough to imprison a person . . . not the best approach for a so-called free society.

Some folks who purport to use speed or other seduction methods come off as assholes . . . yes . . . okay, a whole lot of them really are assholes . . . but that doesn’t mean that it is inherently an asshole’s approach or that being an asshole is rape.

Approaching women for sex and only sex is not against the law. No one gets charged with love-’em-and-leave-’em as a crime.

If one were to prove that their belief that the women who assent to sex with a speed seducer have lost their free will, then, yes, it is coersion and a form of rape . . . however, I would suggest that their free will is still very much in play as influence or even classic hypnosis does not work that way. They may have been influenced, but it has been consensual . . . consent is still very much part of the process. Some of these guys who use the approach may be heartless predators but they still play very much within the consensual paradigm . . . otherwise they would not need to learn influence skills, they would just be the heartless rapist their critics have characterized them as.

Not all speed seducers are predators though, many are just regular guys who want to learn how to meet and be with women . . . they are looking for skills for positive outcomes both for themselves and for the women they interact with.

Saying that does not mean I endorse the official speed seduction system, but I do recognize that despite the macho posturing and rather sophomoric terminology, it is not inherently an evil or dangerous thing . . . particularly if the practitioners are doing what it preaches . . . which is to create positive states and positive consensual experiences for the women one interacts with . . . at the heart of it . . . albeit, many may have rather short-sighted and selfish outcomes in mind when doing so.

In any case, I would encourage women and men learn influence strategies and how to recognize patterns and the like. We should all be able to understand when others are using influence on us so we can make an informed choice as to when we choose to allow these patterns to succeed or not (much of influence is done unconsciously by others and so by understanding the principles we are able to better recognize it and understand our own responses). However, I don’t propose that they learn influence as a defence merely to speed seduction but to any persuaders that cross the lines of ethics from seducers to salesmen to politicians.

Consensual seduction, is a wonderful thing and skills learned from speed seduction or other so-called approaches can be very valuable in helping us to increase the positive aspects of our own consenting relationships. It doesn’t have to be about simple short-sighted short-term success at one-night stands . . . seduction can be about building wonderful lasting experiences with those we truly care about. Even if it is used to help folks meet their one-night-stand outcome goals, who are we to criticise them for their lifestyle choices. If that’s what they want, and as long as it is a consenting relationship between adults, then we’ve no business looking down our noses at them or their lifestyle choices.

I know folks who have found Speed Seduction skills to be very helpful to them in terms of learning how to approach and talk to women (my own view is that saying anything is better than doing nothing in terms of increasing one’s success in relating with the appropriate gender). I also know some folks who use it in a rather creepy way . . . however, speed seduction in and of itself is no more than NLP refined to approach a very specific task set.

If one does not have rapport or congruency, it will not work as well. If one has rapport and real congruency then it cannot

by definition be rape. When it doesn’t work, it is not attempted rape as was stated in the technique forum either . . . it is merely an unsuccessful seduction. Guys approach women all the time and ask them for a date, speed seduction may be a systematic approach but it is still essentially just that. That is not rape nor is it conspiracy to commit rape as the whole system rests upon the need for consent. Consent. Consent.

Having said all that . . . I would suggest that folks looking into it consider other options as well. Of course, their choices are their own.

Ross’s "fuck ’em then leave ’em" attitude doesn’t work for me (I prefer "love ’em, fuck ’em, and keep ‘em" but that’s me, others are free to have their own values and their own lifestyles), but I do know there are plenty of folks out there for whom that appeals (the fuck buddy issue bears to that).

Personally, I tell young people to examine what they’re really after. If they are looking for a manipulative one night stand, then fine. However, if what they’re really after is advice on how to find potential partners and to create long lasting relationships with those people (single or multiple) then they would do better to go to mentors who have been successful in doing that.

If one wants to learn how to have successful relationships, then going to mentors who have never been able to have a long term relationship seems to be a bit unproductive.

My students are very familiar with what I call PHILLIPS’ LAW . . . it’s my rule so I named it . . . and that is . . . "If a man is over forty and has never been married then he is either broken or gay."

There is no reason for a gay man to have married as he doesn’t have the legal opportunities to appropriately commit in that way to another person.

By "broken" I mean that by the age of forty most men will have been able to commit to a longterm relationship with one or more women. If a man has not then he has some sort of relationship dysfunction that makes him unable to do so. Probably, he just doesn’t know how to relate to women in a positive way . . . in my opinion. I know that statement offends some and really pisses off others, but I stand by it. I would also like to stress that not all of these guys are unbearable assholes or the like (albeit, I’ve seen a few of them who definately shouldn’t be procreating anyway) . . . many are really nice guys who are either just too shy to speak up or perhaps they just never learned to spot a woman who is being honest with them and have been taken advantage of more than a human should be (I’ve seen someone give his "girlfriend" a car only to have her accept it and marry another guy two weeks later or pay off his special friend’s mortgage to be dumped within a week).

Phillips’ Law does NOT apply to women, only men. This is because in most populations the ratio of women to men goes higher as we get older (men die off faster than women) so the competition for women to find a mate is much higher than the competition for men to do so. Yes, there may be broken women out there too . . . there are a number of them. However, there are enough factors that push women to find mates and compete that there is a tendancy for them to compromise more in their relationship strategies . . . and yet their chances of being successful at an individual level are lower than with males. I know it seems backasswards to what we have been taught since we were children, but it is so. Sure, guys still are in a high degree of competition to attract the most desirable mates, but when we look at the actual degree and number of possibilities, women are in a much more crowded boat. Women also have the biological clock factor which pushes them to find a compatible mate sooner than men need to. So, as we age, men who are reasonably able to relate even at a bare minimum with women should not have significant difficulties finding a mate. Those who have not been able to do so by forty have been doing something terribly wrong in their relationship strategies . . . thus they are "broken" in that respect. Not that they can’t fix things by learning new strategies.

Obviously, these are generalizations and do not apply to all specific individuals or even all populations (certainly the competition between men in Alaska is pretty high as there are ten men to every one woman while a place like Washington, D.C., has a huge number of women compared to men).

How many non-gay men over forty do you know who have never been married (not divorced, but never married at all)? Now, how many women do you know who have never been married? There will be a few exceptions, but for most folks, they will know a lot more women then men who have never married . . . and, many of the men will be priests (by my strict definition, priests and nuns are also "broken" in terms of the human function of finding sexual/relationship partners – giving up sex, a primary motive by most accounts, Maslow included, is a form of dysfunction . . . despite it being considered some sort of otherworldly higher purpose . . . personally, I prefer that my religious and political leaders have a healthy sexual appetite rather than be ascetics who are denying a part of what makes being human such a joy . . . but that’s me).

As most men don’t really have a mentoring relationship with someone who can point them in the right direction in how to meet, greet, and build a relationship with women, then Speed Seduction and other programs fill a gap. In our interpersonal relationships, most of us don’t talk about how we relate . . . women often do, they will use cooperative strategies to help friends figure out coping or dealing strategies for relationship difficulties. Men don’t talk about relationships . . . they avoid discussing personal problems because of their competitive natures and their fear of loss of face. This has become particularly more true in our modern age where father-son advising has fallen by the wayside with most young men unable to talk comfortably with their fathers about how to approach women for whom they have a sexual attraction. So, relationship gurus are inevitable and a highly positive phenomenon. They help fulfill a need.

Some of them are not the best role models . . . either they come off as too wham-bam-thank-you-maam with only short-term sexual gratification on their menu or they come off as fluffy touchy-feely creepy man-women with no backbone and a lot of swish to their walk who are saying men should worship women rather than live with them. Men and women are different. Hell, it’s not just that we’re from Mars and they’re from Venus . . . we think, behave, and act differntly for a reason . . . even our DNA is different (a number of reports have noted that when we compare human DNA to our closest known living relative, the chimpanzee, the DNA of a male human and a male chimp is closer than the DNA of a male human and a female human and the same goes for the women . . . we are genetically so different from one another that we have more in common with another male of another species than with a female from our own species . . . and the women are the same). We should acknowledge our differences and celebrate them. While we shouldn’t fall into the chimp trap of treating women like so much refuse and abusing them, the macho dillemna, neither should be allow ourselves to be emasculated into submissive powerlessness. Women don’t want a chimp neither do they want a bonobo, they want a man . . . a real man who is comfortable being who and what he is and loves women for who and what they are . . . neither seeing the other as inferior nor as prey, both celebrating their own and the others sexuality.

As seduction science is not just about getting laid . . . that may very well be part of it . . . but it’s also about finding potential partners to explore the possibilities and either move on if the longterm possibilities are just not there or to forge new long-lasting relationships. Anyone who preaches relationships but not sexuality is just fooling themselves. Sex is a big part . . . a major part . . . of healthy relationships and even the most longterm relationship more often than not begins with sexual attraction.

There are a number of seduction gurus who I would never reccommend. They are one-night-standers or creepy-uncle-billies or swishy-emasculators. However, I would strongly encourage anyone looking to hook up with women (and even that term implies a connection, a human connection beyond just a physical one) to find a mentor.

While I am a great advocate of folks learning standard induction-based hypnosis as well as self-hypnosis to better their lives, I don’t believe learning hypnosis is the single best strategy for learning to approach women or have a relationship.

It can play a role, but that is a supplementary support role, not a primary approach role.

I encourage any married or unmarried male to get Mark Cunningham’s "Build a Better Girlfriend" set as his advice is often right on the money. While many of the attendees at the seminar were there to learn how to "program" their girls into being exclusive hot mantool addicted sluts who cook, what they learned was that women will do just about anything for the man they love . . . anything . . . and the trick to it is to be the man the kind of man they would love and do anything for . . . not "pretend to be" but to "be" . . . as well as a lot of positive reinforcement that translates into some good relationship maintenance. I also reccommend Mark’s "How to Score with Married Women" . . . not that I would reccommend that folks go out trying to score with married women, don’t hunt in another dog’s yard . . . but rather the positive reinforcement advice he gives translates into new relationships as well as old (if you follow Mark’s advice then you will NEVER need to fear that your wife might stray from fidelty to your relationship . . . women who sleep with other men are looking for something, if you’re in a relationship and your wife is getting what she needs and is looking for then other guys will never be a problem).

In any case, seduction is not inherently a bad thing . . . it is a good thing . . . it is a natural part of what we do as humans, what we’ve always done . . . intent and rapport and congruence are important parts of it. Any seduction is a two-way communication event. It must in its very nature be consensual to be successful. If it is not consensual, then it isn’t really seduction. Folks who are not schooled in influence or neurolinguistic programming or hypnotic language patterns still use them in their seductions, they do so naturally as that’s how humans communicate sexually . . . however, even when someone is schooled and uses them, it is still a consensual event. If a woman agrees to a sexual relationship with a guy after he has talked to her, then it is not rape. It is influence but there is no law against influence, it is what we do. She still has to make up her mind to act upon the feelings or not.

The guy who uses liquor to get girls loose and ready and loosen their inhibitions or the guy who approaches women who have been drinking even though he has not given them the drinks or may not even be aware that they’ve been drinking is more culpable than some guy using language patterns to talk to girls about things that excite them in a way that emotionally touches them. Talk is talk. In order for the talk to work, she has to already be open to the experience. That is consent, not rape.

Wow, this got long real fast. I know there’s a point to all this somewhere . . . hidden in the asides. In my longwinded opinion. Others are free to disagree . . . and they no doubt will.

All the best,
Brian