Practical Female Psychology for the Practical Man - David Clare, Joseph South, Franco 2008

Screening: HSE vs. LSE Women

What I need

Is a pretty woman next to me

To share the dreams that I believe

Maybe we could start a family

Someone who truly understands, how to treat a man

This is what I need

— I Need A Girl (Part II), by P. Diddy & Ginuwine

Everyone screens. Men and women always screen for a potential partner and for a relationship, and they do so consciously and unconsciously. On the conscious level, we seek to find the features in our potential partners that we rationally believe will suit us the best. On the unconscious level, we are motivated by the magnificent strength of our biological and evolutionary drives.

Gender Differences with Screening

With regards to unconscious screening, nature has created an interesting mismatch between men and women. Men are especially driven by visual features when screening. It’s important that you become fully conscious of that fact in order to be able to screen well.

Women, on the other hand, are particularly motivated by things such as a man’s masculine dominance, social status and personality.

It’s easy to observe the manner in which women screen, Just look at any internet dating site. Women typically present a long shopping list of the qualities they think they want in a man. Men do this too, but most men will admit — if asked privately — that what they are really hoping for is a woman that they find physically attractive.

Because of these differences in the screening process, men are usually completely unaware of how they present themselves to women.

As a man, the two most important things that you should understand about screening are that

1. Women are always screening you.

2. The way you present yourself will be the determining factor with regards to the women available to you for sexual relationships.

Tied in with your more visual nature as a man, you’ll notice that when it comes to sexual partners, you appreciate quantity. In reality, there are probably hundreds of women within walking distance of you right now who you would find sufficiently attractive. If you’re like most men, if the woman is physically attractive, available and not completely crazy, then you would be inclined to start some sort of a relationship with her.

Women, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with the quality of mates they choose. This is not to say that women are on average any less promiscuous than men are; it is just that the criteria we naturally use when selecting a mate is fundamentally different from our female counterparts.

The problem that many men face is that they will often fail to screen for the personality of their potential partners. This is what women mean when they say “men think with their dicks.” Women are very well aware of how primitive or instinctual men can be when they screen for women.

If the quality of your relationship is important to you, then you will want to avoid most situations with women who display too low self esteem (LSE). As we described in detail in the last chapter, only women with healthy self-esteem (HSE) are truly able to enjoy healthy relationships with other people.

It is important to discuss some of the pitfalls you will encounter with the screening, and how to recognize women with LSE. After you’ve mastered this skill, you’ll be free to spend your time and energy on the multitude of HSE women that surround you. For motivation, let’s examine some examples of poor screening.

Poor Screening: Two Classic Examples

One classic situation we see over and over again is the successful nice guy with a high sex drive who is only able to attract Materialistas by virtue of his material wealth, or Good Girls who view him as a potential provider and a fixer-upper “project.” You can often spot such a man by his preposterous lack of fashion sense (as if his mother still dressed him), poor posture, passive-aggressive attitude with respect to women and relationships and generally deferential attitude towards the woman. His relationship with both the Good Girl and the Materialista is likely to be notable for its lack of hot sex, and by a substantial amount of drama. This situation occurs because he has been screening for women only based on his sexual drive with the Madonna stereotype present in his mind. (See Chapters 16 and 17 on the Madonna/whore Complex for more information on this point).

Another classic situation is the reformed player who would like to settle down but can’t seem to find any Good Girls. Even the way he walks attracts Adventuress-type chicks and screens out the Good Girls, without him even being aware that it is happening. The reason for this is because the man lacks the skills necessary to detect aspects of a woman’s personality which might actually qualify her as a good prospect for a more committed relationship.

In both these cases, these men are simply not screening women appropriately for what they really want, and they are suffering because of it. As are the women with whom they become involved.

More Examples of Poor Screening

All of these examples are based wholly on real situations.

Mom leaves Dad and the kids and runs off with the East Bay Rats motorcycle gang. Dad obviously didn’t screen very well.

He was far too attracted to the good sex she was giving to him and forgot to consider her personality as a factor. And given that he had in fact scored an Adventuress, he didn’t take advantage of this fact (wild sex, threesomes, etc.) while the taking was good.

Wife leaves husband, takes the kids, the house, the car, everything. This wife either has some Materialista in her, or she is seriously LSE, or perhaps both. Either way, husband didn’t screen well enough. He was letting his Madonna/whore Complex and his visual sexuality affect his judgement and he did not see the important factors in her personality. Sir Paul McCartney is a recent example of this. No matter what kind of woman Heather Mills really is, McCartney certainly didn’t screen for the type of woman he wanted.

Dad works hard to provide for his family, and when he comes home he wants some peace and quiet and happy, smiling faces surrounding him. Instead, his wife is constantly complaining about how awful things supposedly are. The man is baffled; as far as he can tell, they have a decent life and a healthy family. They should be reasonably happy, but instead, the wife is only able to focus on and magnify every little negative detail. While his wife may well be a Good Girl, she may also have low self-esteem and a relatively high, unfulfilled sex drive. This man did not screen for a calm, peaceful woman.

What should I Screen for?

Many men wonder about the type of woman they should screen for. This is the most important question, which most men will NOT answer truthfully. The most truthful answer is “What kind of woman am I capable of finding?” followed closely “What’s available?” Most men don’t have enough experience to even realize that asking such questions is critical, or feel guilt and shame for wanting to have the best relationships possible.

The reason that so many men do not ask “What am I capable of?” or “What is available?” is because most men do not have enough skills to meet a lot of women and seduce them. Instead of developing the skills, they settle for whatever they can get with their current skill set, or for what society and their peers deem acceptable. They reside in a world of sexual scarcity, making themselves much too easily available to women, whereas women operate from a position of sexual abundance. In other words, women tend to make themselves scarce so that men feel that they have to supplicate in order to get something from a woman.

The most important quality in a woman is how she treats you. If you cannot handle contentious, contrary women with a high sex drive, you had best screen them out. Women who have a high sex drive and have high self esteem will still give you lots of drama, to be sure, but it will be of a different nature. The HSE woman is giving you drama primarily as a means of continuously testing your strength as a man. The LSE woman, on the other hand, gives drama in a self-destructive and even vindictive and malicious fashion.

Most men, especially when younger, screen on looks alone. This is nearly always a mistake. As the old saw goes, “kissin’ don’t last like cookin’.”

How she treats you

HSE women are able to love themselves and they do not engage in self-destructive behavior. She also demonstrates that she is capable of treating you and the other people in her life as well as she treats herself.

All women — both HSE and LSE — have a natural tendency to seek power over their men. However, an HSE woman will target your heart. This means that after having tested you for Alpha qualities, the HSE woman will try to gain rapport with you and achieve some kind of ownership over your mind and your feelings. On the other hand, the LSE woman will mainly use self-destructive drama in her quest to achieve power over you.

An HSE woman will demonstrate the skill to respect the borders of your ego. When an HSE woman tries to change you — as all women will do to one degree or another — she will do so in a respectful way, from a frame of love and a sense of connection with you. She will often say things like, “I feel that we mean a lot to each other. I would love you to open up to me more”. With an HSE woman, you will get the feeling that she wants to own your heart and mind, but in a non-violent way.

Conversely, an LSE woman will often invade the borders of your ego with severe drama or violence. In some cases, she will even be unaware that you have such borders.

An HSE woman’s primary concern will be to gain rapport with you, while her own feelings will be of secondary concern. An LSE woman, on the other hand, will be continuously talking or complaining about how you make her feel, with little or no concern about gaining rapport with you.

We are aware that with this criteria we are screening out a lot of women in the western world today, but we do not care; we are more concerned with the safety and well-being of ourselves and you, the reader.

Now that you are clearly able to recognize women for their primary attributes, you are in a position to look beyond physical beauty and focus on true compatibility with your goals and desires. The great news is that once you develop these skills you will automatically become more attractive to women in general. Women find men who know what they want in life to be highly attractive. However, LSE women will now typically disqualify themselves from a relationship with you, because they start to recognize that they do not deserve a relationship with a man of your calibre.

How to Screen Effectively

The most important weapon in a man’s arsenal of screening techniques is being able to control the frame of interaction, right from the beginning of the relationship. This is done most easily by “sweeping a woman off of her feet”. A man that has the skills to meet, attract and lay a woman within a few hours smashes her Magic Pussy Syndrome and will have a window within which the choice of pursuing a relationship with the woman is at his convenience and on his terms, not hers.

This is 180 degrees opposite the cultural norm, where women choose not only for sex, but also for the relationship. We believe that in modern, western culture, this unilateral female power is deadly to successful, long-term relationships.

When we say that you should control the frame, that doesn’t mean we want you to be a controlling, domineering jerk. It means we want you to know what you want and to be determined to not accept anything less than that.

In the long run, when a man does not know what he wants in a relationship, the woman will feel compelled to fill the leadership vacuum. If a feminine woman is forced to take on the role of leader within a relationship, she will inevitably lose attraction and respect for the man, sooner or later.

Eliciting Values

Understanding a woman’s value structure is critical for evaluating the potential for a successful relationship. Eliciting values (EV) is a very useful tool that we can borrow from the field of neurolinguistic programming (NLP). The idea behind EV is to find out what is important to a woman, and what she desires in life and in her relationships.

The correct way to elicit a woman’s values is to get her to talk about herself and her past relationships freely. This cannot be done if you are interrogating her in an interview style; rather it should flow through normal conversation. It will be helpful to put a woman at ease by revealing little tidbits about yourself at the same time, or at a minimum, displaying empathy and understanding for the things she is telling you.

It is also important to be completely non-judgmental when a woman is revealing details about her personality. If you reveal your standards and moral principles too quickly, it is a surefire way to have the woman either clam up completely, or to try to start painting an inaccurate picture of herself based on what she thinks you want to hear.

With experience, you will be able to quickly determine the woman’s level of self-esteem by what she reveals about her past and current relationships. You will want to ask yourself continuously, is this a woman who sees the good in people under most circumstances (HSE)? Or is she someone who is constantly seeking to criticize and tear others down(LSE)? Is this a woman who tolerates and perpetuates physical, emotional, or verbal abuse (LSE)? Or is she someone who avoids abusive people and situations (HSE)?

Compliance

Once you are able to control the frame, you will quickly discover that LSE women are incapable of following you as the leader of the relationship, no matter how self-assured and in control of yourself you are. On the other hand, HSE women will find it much easier to admire and respect a man who displays such leadership qualities.

The way to distinguish between LSE and HSE women on this point is by mastering a technique called compliance. If you ask an HSE woman to do something for you, she may test you to see if you are confident enough to really be asking for the thing that you are asking from her. And an HSE woman will likely reject any request to do something that she considers demeaning or degrading to herself.

An LSE woman, on the other hand, will sometimes get angry and hostile towards normal, reasonable requests and she will often comply with degrading or abusive demands. If you do not wish to abuse a woman, you can simply ask about her past relationships, or put hypothetical propositions to her, and watch carefully how she responds.

The LSE Threshold Test

We spoke about the LSE Threshold Test in the last chapter but it bears revisiting. Why? Because screening women on their self-esteem is so important!

Start off by playfully joking with a woman, then move towards making mildly insulting comments, and go as far as you reasonably can. The point at which she objects to what you are saying indicates her threshold.

If you find that you are able to say things to a woman that make you uncomfortable by saying them, and the woman is responding either neutrally or by becoming sexually aroused, then you can be sure that the woman is more LSE than what your standards for a relationship will dictate.

Please note that under no circumstances do we advocate any kind of abuse in the context of a romantic relationship. The LSE Threshold Test is, however, an elegant mechanism for you to determine a woman’s level of self-esteem when you first begin interacting with her. The test does not necessarily need to be run for very long or more than once. From there, you can decide whether you want to continue interacting in a normal way with the woman, or not. Furthermore, this test can be completely playful and non-judgemental, while at the same time subcommunicating your standards.

The Double Bind

One very effective means that you can employ to detect LSE women is observing the degree to which they demonstrate something called the double bind.

The essence of a double bind is the presentation of two conflicting demands, neither of which can be ignored, and which leave the victim torn between two options. The “options” are presented to the victim in such a way that whichever demand they try to meet, they find that the other demand cannot be met.

“I must do it (or say it) but I can’t do it (or say it)” is a typical victim’s description of the double-bind experience. For example, imagine trying to respond to a hostile woman, who is shouting at you, “I know that you don’t love me!”

Psychologists have described the double bind as a pathological phenomenon. However, within the context of romantic relationships, it can also occur in situations which could be described as normal and to be expected.

The positive purpose of the double bind in human sexuality is to act directly upon the limbic system of the brain, so as to create a situation of confusion, which is meant to lower a lover’s defense mechanisms, with the purpose of increasing the chances of sexual intercourse. Therefore, in spite of the painful nature of double binds, they can actually be a sign that your woman is becoming sexually aroused!

Well-adjusted people with healthy self-esteem will be able to get into situations involving the double bind, and back out again by employing normal, psychologically-healthy defense mechanisms. If a woman’s use of double binds are rare and short-lived, then this is a good indication that she has high self-esteem.

On the other hand, if a woman is persistently and massively using double binds against you, and this is not connected with her becoming sexually aroused, then this is a clear-cut indication that the woman is LSE. This is because the behavior indicates that she is unable to verbalize the emotions connected with her sexuality in a mature, adult way.

Practical Advice

Much of proper screening results from having an appropriate self-image, and demonstrating your self-image in a way the effectively communicates to women what your standards are. The following advice will help you to naturally screen desirable women into your life, reducing the amount of effort to screen undesirable women out.

Being congruent, also known as “acting normal”, is very attractive to women. When your internal self-image matches how women perceive you, that is called being congruent, and as a result, your attractiveness to the opposite sex increases. Sexual selection can then proceed. Women that aren’t attracted to you will simply not appear in your life. Contrast this with the problem of breaking up with women you became involved with attempting to be someone you weren’t.

Owning your own frame with sincerity is also crucial. If you really know and understand what it is that you want, you will find a large selection of women with the desire to bond with you, on your terms. Women in general just want to know what your terms are, whether you accept them as they are, and how likely you are to change your mind.

Having a man who knows what he wants is very comforting to women, while a man who doesn’t know what he wants is a sexual turnoff and can even be frightening, especially to HSE women. Again, women without an appreciation for what you stand for simply won’t be around.

The man who doesn’t know what he wants, who cannot express his desire to women, puts women in a position of being responsible for the emotional content of the relationship. This will only be attractive to LSE women. And not only will unnecessary drama ensue, but a woman cannot feel at ease with a man who is so unsure of himself.

Having very high social value such that women clamor to be in your presence, is also something you want to cultivate carefully. A-List actors fall into this category. Freaky chicks (Adventuresses), who are primarily driven by external validation will certainly be attracted here. But HSE women across the spectrum of the archetypes are certainly attracted to men who have high social value. In this case, you must manage all of your relationships very carefully. What we do is manage our time, and don’t allow women with romantic intentions, or anyone else, to waste our time.

Having a lot of money allows a man to select among a wide range of women with Materialista characteristics. The more the money, the higher quality the Materialista. Having a lot of money is also attractive to Adventuresses and Good Girls, but for different reasons. Any woman will be attracted to a man who displays the qualities of leadership, ambition, and self-reliance. HSE women will want to share the good life with you, whereas LSE women, with their tendency towards self-destructiveness, will sooner or later start to exhibit signs that they are poised to damage your material interests.