Doctor’s Note: Hey all.
One of the frequent requests I get from my readers is to add a little more help specifically for the geeky women out there who have just as hard a time finding love or sex as their male counterparts do. Since my advice is based on my perspective as a guy who’s had to learn how to get better at dating women… well, I’m not going to have the same experiences or frustrations. But rather than let everyone hang, I’ve asked my friend Arden Leigh to help out. So without further ado…
Hello, lovely lady-followers of Dr. NerdLove! This week, the Doctor has been kind enough to loan me his platform from which to speak to you all. Let me introduce myself. My name is Arden Leigh, and I am the author of The New Rules Of Attraction and the founder of The Sirens Seduction Forum For Women. My calling in life is to help women turn their wildest romantic wishes into reality, and Dr. NerdLove himself asked me if I would come on here and give his female fellowship a few pointers on how to make all their sexiest dreams come true.
I do this work because for a long time I was completely clueless as to how to create for myself any kind of love life at all. I had my first kiss at age 17 — with my openly gay male best friend. I didn’t have a boyfriend (or even have sex) until I was 22. And lest you doubt my nerd cred, I grew up playing D&D, I spent my afternoons in high school on the speech and debate team, and my cat is named Wesley after Ensign Crusher on TNG.
You Have All the Permission You Need to Be Sexual
If you’re like me, you might have grown up being labeled “unfuckable,” or some PG-13 variation thereof. Not only was I not in the cool kids’ crowd, but my nickname was Cousin It because I had long hair, and there were a lot of jokes slung about my gender being in question because I had no boobs. Even after I grew into my looks, this sense of less-ness stayed with me for a long time, and sex felt like something that was for other girls, girls with blonde hair and curves. To this day, I freaking love having sex while looking in the mirror, not because I’m that much of a narcissist (well, maybe a little), but because my inner dialogue is like, “Oh my god that’s ME! I’m having SEX! I’m an ADULT!”
So here’s a secret I’m going to share with you: You are an adult, and you have all the permission you need to be a ravenous sexual creature. You don’t need it from anyone but yourself. You can be as sexy as you want to be, even if that means letting your hair down and showing cleavage, or you can be as understated as you want to be, revealing your sexuality only for those you deem worthy. It’s up to you, but both are valid choices, and however sexy you decide you want to appear should correlate only to how happy it makes you.
“But Arden,” you say, “I want to be sexy but I don’t know how!” Well that brings me to our next point.
Whoever You Are, There Is a Sexy Version of You Out There
A lot of women I coach feel held back by their physical appearance. They don’t love their bodies, or they look at them and see only the flaws. The thing is, there are soooo many different ways to be sexy. What you need to do is find your heroines, your role models — women with a similar body type to you who are portraying their sexualities in ways that you relate to. If you’re skinny and boyish, look at women like Twiggy, Kate Moss, or post-yoga Madonna. If you’re curvy, look at Russ Meyer heroines, Christina Hendricks, or Rebel Wilson (seriously, try telling that girl she’s not hot!). Or anything in between.
The point is, for every possible body type that’s out there, there is a woman who is rocking it out in her own way, so there’s no excuse for you not to do the same.
Rock Your Body Language
One of the keys to feeling great about your body is to develop amazing body language. This can be achieved with a little attention and practice. First, find your body language heroine. (Mine is Tricia Helfer as Number Six on Battlestar Galactica, but you might also look at Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman or Angelina Jolie as, well, anyone.) Then, practice emulating her movements.
I love Number Six so much I did a burlesque routine as her to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” and here is evidence.
Chances are you’ll notice a few things: she moves leading from the hips with her pelvis thrust ever so slightly forward, she sways her hips very subtly, she keeps her spine elongated, and she keeps her chin tilted downward with her eyes fixed upward and straight ahead. In fact, try those things out right now. Yes, right now. Get up from your computer and walk across your room doing the things I just listed. You feel sexier already, don’t you?
Men are highly suggestible creatures. If you walk and talk like you’re sexy, they’ll believe you’re sexy. There’s a degree of fake-it-til-you-make-it in all of this. Sometimes I still feel like I’m faking it, but I have a blast while doing it, and people I know seem to like it, so I stick with it. It’s okay to be a little bit performative, if you want to. Fantasy is by nature performative. And speaking of fantasy…
Look To Your Literature For Inspiration
Here’s one thing I often don’t understand about nerd culture: it is FILLED with examples of men and women who are awesome, desirable human beings (or non-human beings), and yet so many nerds themselves often feel at a loss for how to appoint themselves in a similar fashion. Like, I’m actually confused by how little crossover there is between nerd culture and fitness culture, in my experience. You think Batman didn’t work out in order to be fit enough to fight crime? Hell no! Y’all saw Captain America going through multiple punching bags when training to join the Avengers, am I right? So, what gives? Despite what Sony’s marketing department might try to tell you, heroes don’t get kickass by sitting around playing video games. (That said, there is a very cool factor to girl gamer culture these days — in fact, I often wish I had more time to be a gamer myself — but gaming alone won’t make you feel awesome.)
I started training in parkour and krav maga because of what I saw in action/superhero movies. I wanted to be able to be just as kickass as Catwoman, Black Widow, and that chick from Raging Phoenix (Netflix it, you’ll thank me later) combined. I also got certified in NLP and hypnosis because I wanted to be like Derren Brown from Mind Control with Derren Brown, like Simon Baker on The Mentalist ((Who continually tries to convince me I can actually wear vests… – DNL )) , and again, Black Widow (technically I got NLP-certified years before Avengers came out, but did you SEE her mad interrogation skills??). Whatever it is you admire, whether it’s Buffy’s ass-kicking or Willow’s computer-hacking, there are classes out there for it. Go. Commit to just once a week at first, and before long your friends and loved ones will be trying to peel you away.
This needs to be said on this particular topic: Whatever skill you choose to master, you will suck at it at first. This is natural and completely normal. My first parkour class was embarassing. Seriously, I was so physically incapable of even the warm-up that I almost ran out of class and vomited. A year and a half later I’m running up walls. Whatever you do, aim for one thing and one thing only: to suck at it just a little less each time. And to keep going back.
This also needs to be said on this particular topic: You don’t need to be Catwoman, a genius computer programmer, or a boxing champion to be in a great relationship. You are great enough just as you are. But in my experience, doing these things builds confidence: when you do cool things, you can approach people you are attracted to knowing that you do cool things, and that makes it easier to talk to them somehow.
The Cool Kids Aren’t Really All That Cool
Here’s an interesting rite of passage that I think a lot of pickup artists (which I identify as) go through, and hopefully, eventually, surpass. We grew up nerdy and unable to get the cool kids to pay us any positive attention, so as adults, we learn a skill set for seduction and apply it to that kind of partner we could never get when we were younger, because somehow if we get that person to want us, then we’ve won at life. In male PUAs, this applies to the HB1 9s and 10s, the shot girls, the strippers, the party girls, the girls with great big boobs and blonde hair extensions, so much like the cool cheerleading captain who wouldn’t give them the time of day when they were younger.
In me, this meant dating rockstars. I wanted the guys with guitars, with dyed hair and perfectly ripped jeans. I dated a whole bunch of these guys for years because it made me feel like I had finally left that awful, sexually frustrated, awkward, geeky version of myself behind. If these guys liked me, then I must be cool, right? I mean, they toured with Nikki Sixx! They headlined Irving Plaza! They had so many fans on Facebook! But here’s the thing: most of them I couldn’t actually talk to in any real, genuine manner. They didn’t really get me or my work. If I said something that sounded smart, many of them felt vaguely threatened, and would retaliate by yelling at me for an hour because I couldn’t remember that Keith Richards was in the Rolling Stones2 .
All my friends started getting on my case for always dating the exact same guy and thinking that things would work out differently somehow. So I took their advice and asked out a guy who was way nerdy, way successful, and way smart. And oh my god, I could talk to him, and he understood and appreciated the things that I said. I had forgotten that I was smart, and with him, I got to nurture that part of myself again. And because our communication was so intense, our sex was some of the best sex I’ve ever had in my life. (Suck it, rockers!)
The cool kids really aren’t all that cool. Now if you need to go find that out for yourself, I support you, and I will help you go through that rite of passage like I did. But you might as well save yourself some time and take my word for it. Whatever your interests and values are, they are awesome, and you owe it to yourself to find someone who appreciates them, and you. So go where you’re going to find those guys. Don’t feel obligated to go pick up guys in bars or nightclubs; chances are there’s no way to tell in those environments if they’re even your type. Let your interests dictate your social life, and let your social life dictate your choice of partner.
Communicate Your Interest (Flirt!)
Let’s say you do find a guy you’re attracted to, and he seems to be a great choice for you because he shares passions that are similar to yours, and you are rocking an amazing style based on your chosen image, and you are doing some cool things that serve to reinforce to you the awesome value you bring to the table, so you’re feeling fairly confident by now. Go talk to him!! There is this old school mythology (*cough cough* The Rules! *cough cough*) that says that if a guy sees you and likes you, he will immediately approach you, talk to you, ask you out, and pursue you even when you make that necessary maneuver of being inexplicably unavailable the first fifty billion times he asks. But as my male pickup artist instructor friends know, there are scores of men out there who are too shy to approach the girls they like (some of them who even pay thousands of dollars to get over themselves and learn how, which is how several of my friends make a living).
So sometimes you’ve got to grow a pair and do the approaching yourself.
Every single guy I have dated in the past four or so years, I have approached and asked out myself. If you see a guy you like, go talk to him. You will be doing him a favor, because you will be an awesome, kickass, self-actualized, feminine, sexual creature who knows what she wants and what she has to offer.
So… what are you waiting for?? Get out there and start seducing! Life is too short not to go after what you want.
Want more Arden? Check out her book The New Rules Of Attraction, her organization The Sirens Seduction Forum For Women, her seduction blog, her beauty/product review blog, her Twitter @ardensirens, or her Instagram also @ardensirens.