The Great Irony of Peacocking as Both Sex Symbol and Red Flag
Peacocking is the greatest sex repellant ever invented
Sex sells, and when it comes to sex selling to men, the general trope and theme of the message are that over-the-top extravagance wins. Commercials bombard us throughout our days, promising that if only we’d consume the right products, we could be successful with women beyond our wildest dreams.
Never do these promises seek to answer the quandary of how women might feel about that. Left out of such conversations are discussions of how women might feel about being manipulated, used like a piece of cake draped before the mouths of hungry, ravenous, desperate men.
You may remember Erik von Markovik, the self-professed Pickup Artist from a decade and a half ago who went by the pseudonym “Mystery.” He was the one always wearing fuzzy costumes made of feathers and dawning odd, antiquated hats for attention.
He got famous for the provocative and degrading book he wrote titled The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women into Bed, published in 2007.
In his book, he refers to women as “targets” and recommends that men only approach a woman to try to spark up a conversation if they do so within three seconds of seeing her. If they hesitate any longer, they’ll discourage themselves and lose their bravado.
His site is still up, and he’s still peddling corny pickup lines in book form (and merch to go along with them), just in case you needed to announce you’re a douchebag from the mountaintops without even opening your mouth.
Can we just let the poor, pathetic, bad, old meme of pickup-artist ideology die out yet? We should have seen it coming in the early-to-mid-2000s, that there’d be a group of guys out there who took evolutionary science a little too seriously — or not seriously enough — and decided to utilize a vague and piss-poor reading of the far-from-complete scientific literature on the subject to try to obtain abundant sex.
“Mystery” was famous for peacocking.
“Peacocking,” as it was called when the term was coined by the pickup artist movement somewhere around the late 1990s or early 2000s, is the act of displaying yourself like a male peacock displays his extravagant show of features for the female peahen.
Ever see those guys with loud pipes put on their tiny cars to make them blurt out ungodly noises as they drive around, forcing everyone to pay attention to them?
That’s peacocking.
Or what about the guys who bathe in a flowing shower of cologne before they go out on the town? Sometimes, you can smell these guys from around the corner before you can even see them.
That’s peacocking.
Normal car noises and small spritzes of cologne aren’t enough — these men need to go above and beyond in everything they do in order to announce their presence. They’re the same men who manspread, mansplain (yes, even to other men), and are generally obnoxious to be around 24/7.
I used to joke that I believed that Axe Body Spray was secretly invented by women, so they could smell douchebags from a mile away and know who to avoid. I’ve still yet to test my hypothesis.
Axe Body Spray could be a sex-repellent that was packaged and sold in a can that promised, right there on the label, to attract women. Their commercials told us so, and they still continue to tell us so.
Relax, if you like to wear Axe, it’s just a joke. But it’s a joke that speaks to several cultural phenomena—every joke has a grain of truth.
And what do we think these hypermasculine men are all about, strutting around town with their AR15 rifles and openly carried handguns? What about these Diet Coke revolutionaries in their “militias” (err, terrorist organizations) and their constant need to prove their fitness to engage in violence should a violent encounter beset them?
That’s peacocking.
It’s stunning how often men do things that impress their male buddies when they’re trying to impress women.
Peacocking is what men do when they literally make a caricature of themselves in order to display some form of identity movement they belong to or to emphasize some trait about themselves in order to attract women.
Since women wear lipstick to make their natural lips look more vibrant and colorful, men decided to start toting loaded firearms around town and dressing up in literal costumes in an attempt to attract women.
But they do so much more than just this…
They build their entire lives around their incessant need to be the center of attention. A Universe where they aren’t one of the most important people in existence is a Universe they don’t want to live in.
And when deprived of the attention they feel entitled to, such men quickly turn to hostility, anger, and sometimes violence in order to reassert their superiority, bandaging up their perceived emotional injuries beset upon them by a world that didn’t cater to them with their desired amount of idolatry.
Like the bottom-feeders of a multi-level marketing scheme, the guys who got in late were left holding the bag when, over time, women got wise to the games, all while the originators of the movement probably made off quite rich and well-off, and they’re thoroughly pissed off about this fact.
Meanwhile, the creators probably found and secured solid relationships with their newfound celebrity status, a status that would come and go as quickly as any other fad.
What such men communicate is nothing shy of a miracle in the world of paradox: they communicate the literal opposite of what they intend to communicate when they peacock.
They intend to communicate sexual availability, desirability, confidence, and power — yet, they end up communicating weakness, attention-seeking behavior, selfishness that grows from the soil of internal weakness,
Ironic, isn’t it?
That the whole goal was to attract women, and in doing so, men managed to figure out a way to repel them. Peacocking is just bad form, and men shouldn’t be doing it.
It’s essentially little more than concentrated sex repellent — warning: contents under pressure. Keep out of reach of children.
This noxious mix of masculine biohazards comes in a volatile, combustible container of feathered hats or camouflage, a can that can erupt suddenly when pressed or even so much as rubbed the wrong way. It warns any and all bystanders of the hazardous nature of the person doing the peacocking.
This guy is so insecure and vulnerable he’s willing to go to any lengths to prove to perfect strangers that he’s a “badass” 24/7. Peacocking isn’t the great flag of sexual desirability (and availability) that men think it is, but rather, the gargantuan red flag that the rest of us run from the moment we set eyes on it.
But what if we ditched these over-the-top, hypermasculine movements that seemed to have overtaken the critical thinking capabilities and cerebral cortices of millions? What if we, instead of trying to run around waving flags as testaments to our masculinity, took a step back and asked ourselves what kind of friends, family members, lovers, and partners, real people in the real world actually want?
Because I assure you, chasing the dragon of striving to live up to the fictional and fantastical desires that we implant into the minds of the amorphous masses of others we want to impress is a recipe for isolation, loneliness, and misery.
We can’t just assume that everybody is the way we want them to be, so our shortcuts and life hacks will work at manipulating them. We must learn to nurture and become empathic, connecting with others instead if we ever want to establish worthwhile bonds with them.