A few weeks ago, I was staring a strange man in the eyes during an energetic coaching session. I’d met him just a few hours before; like nearly all men I’ve known for a few hours, he was nice but average, unstimulating; I’d introduced myself with a polite handshake and didn’t think much of it. This is why now, locked in eye contact, it was absolutely disconcerting that my vagina was wet. This had never happened to me before.

I’m not exactly a noob to seduction. When I was 20, I went on a semi-harrowing OKCupid date and woke up the next morning in my date’s bed. I asked him how did you get me to sleep with you? He shrugged and handed me a book on pickup artistry, and I sat down on his couch and read it. Then I went and read more; I joined pickup artistry forums, reddit’s r/seduction, joined ‘game’ chat rooms where the men circled me like sharks around blood in the water. I learned about compliance testing, kino escalation, oneitis. I liked getting seduced well, and would sometimes explicitly identify a man’s techniques to his face before sleeping with him.

So when I found this stranger successfully generating arousal in me without using a single seduction technique, I was intrigued and a little terrified. This was beyond my rather extensively developed models! It was not in my worldview that someone could be hot by staring at me and using energy or whatever.

I was hooked. I kept working with this coaching, as an assistant. The structure was that a man would stand before me, and we’d stare at each other. Then the coach would come around and give small corrections and feedback. “It seems like you’re cut off from your stomach,” the coach would say. “Move your shoulders up and back.” The guy would move his shoulders. “Relax your butthole.” The guy’s butthole presumably unclenched. “Did your mom do this to you?” the coach would ask. “You’re searching for her approval”, “it’s okay to feel this”, “say it again but into the ground,” he would say. At one point I heard him say “Bite me, bitch.” The coach was weird and charming; a 32-year-old broad shouldered man inexplicably wearing a backwards baseball cap. He seemed to straddle the line between random wildness and uncanny perceptivity.

I’d pay close attention to my own experience. I’d say whatever I felt was true for me in connection with the men, even if it didn’t make sense or I didn’t understand it. “I feel afraid of you,” or “I want to hurt you,” or “I feel motherly towards you.”

I’d never sat and stared hard at my own experience about a man in front of me before, at least not in a coaching context where I was explicitly framed as an object of desire, against which men were working through their issues with women.

“Do you want to fuck her?” The coach asked the man before me. “Yes,” said the man, locked in eye contact with me. “I don’t believe you,” I said, because I didn’t. The man took a breath, settled down into himself, and said again “I want to fuck you.” I eyed him, and checked inside my body if I felt like I trusted him. “Okay, I think I believe you,” I said.

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