Check Out WikiHow's Illustrated Guide to Picking Up Girls in the Club
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Check Out WikiHow's Illustrated Guide to Picking Up Girls in the Club

Your golden ticket to getting lucky, with or without Daft Punk playing.

Finding love, or more specifically somebody who wants to sleep with you, can be a challenge. Yet it has long been written into the promise of clubland that a night spent dancing under flashing lights over sticky carpets is a golden ticket to a successful chirpse. It's not all bullshit. In an environment where everyone is relaxed, intoxicated, speaking to anyone, and dancing in close proximity to one and another, of course people fairly regularly end up at it — that steamy fumble is only an Uber ride away. It's a beautiful thing.

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However, the idea of pulling in a club is also a pretty profitable one. It's implicitly plastered everywhere, on promotional materials for club nights, in music videos, movies and TV shows, all of which have turned something that should be a possibility, into an expectation. And with expectation comes disappointment. It hardly merits saying that there are, unfortunately, men who assume a woman (and make no mistake — it is always this way round) will absolutely go home with them, provided they play the right game. This is the 'art of pulling'; rules, tactics and methods compiled to assist disappointed, under-sexed, and self-entitled men in their endless quest to finger someone at the back of a night-bus.

Obviously this isn't to say that meeting somebody attractive, buying them a drink, and making weak chat about their job is a bad thing — it's pretty much always great — the misery begins with the large groups who believe there is a formula to this act. That somehow they can predict the reactions and behaviour of people they have never met, purely on the basis that they are going to be female and probably drunk.

It's bleak, but as with many totally awful shit-stains on the crisp linen sheets of the world, it is also laughable. This is no more true than of WikiHow's illustrated guide to picking up girls in a club. We've already given WikiHow a bit of a seeing to when we discovered they had a string of tutorials on how to become a DJ, but this might be their magnum opus. If you haven't come across it before, WikiHow is a crowd-sourced website with 188,809 articles, written by thousands of authors, all aiming to teach anyone with internet access how to do anything. Depressingly this apparently includes 'teaching' sweaty bros how to pull. Handily, each tip comes with an illustration which aesthetically most closely resembles an NHS leaflet on erectile disfunction. Right, let's see what you've got WikiHow you big old misogynistic online community, you.

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Immediately alarming is the use of the word "coalesced", making women sound more like large lakes than people. Also, if you are finding a group hard to approach, it's probably because they are all friends with each other and don't know who you are.

"Is this the event I'm looking for?"
"I don't know what event are you looking for?"
"The…event with the women and that."

At this stage, I'd like to contribute a tip of my own. Find out the name of the event, don't wander round a club staring at every woman you see asking her "is this the event?" You'll look like a creep, but then again, you do read online guides to picking up women so maybe that's the look you're going for.

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I'm genuinely questioning if this guide is trying to make the poor fucker in the purple jacket look like a sociopath. If the first thing you ask someone is "are you alone?", you'll genuinely come across as more sinister than Anton Chigurh. The guy in the brown polo's handshake says "nice to meet you", but his face says "stay fifty feet away at all times".

No time for chit-chat. You've got things to do. Namely, sitting in a toilet cubicle, trying to get signal, so you can read step six.

Fuck off. Seriously fuck off. Writing down names? On a notepad? This isn't bird watching you badly-drawn fuckboy. Why not make a few notes about their appearance so you remember them? Sketch a rough estimate as to their height? See if you can get their national insurance number just to fully complete the picture?

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Better still, DON'T BE A SCUMBAG WHO BRINGS A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE ON HOW TO PRETEND TO BE A HUMAN BEING TO A CLUB.

There's also a guide that helps you find your friends in the club

The blonde girl sits at the bar, but she senses somebody is looking at her. She slowly turns, only to see a sweaty, rosy cheeked bloke in a purple jacket staring at her like he's about to set her on fire. "What are you doing?" "……..resting."

Sadly, at this stage, the man in the purple jacket forgot step nine, panicked, so decided to take a shit in a white tray and carry it around the club with him. Somebody go and get him a napkin.

You are now reading a 'how to' guide that has just advised you to say hello to somebody if you know them, basically meaning that the last few hundred years of technological advance that have led us to a crowd-sourced, internationally accessible, online self-help site have been completely and utterly fucking pointless.

One step up from women, on this guide's social hierarchy, are the club's security. "These people" will often be bored, so will be more than happy to stand and chat to a weirdo in a purple jacket just to inflate his ego. Also, I'm pretty sure that is a drawing of a nine year old boy, so the first conversation with the bouncer will probably start with "have you got any ID?" and end with "let's call your mum."

Start referring to your friends as an entourage. That way you can alienate both the people you've never met, and the ones you've known for years!

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It is important to note that the wing-woman must also be attractive, so don't go making friends based on mutual interests, personality, personal experience or any of that shit.

For this an older woman is ideal, so why not save yourself the bother of not finding anyone and start going to clubs with your Gran. That'll leave them falling over themselves to get to you, stud.

"This will make the cute ones wondering." If you're going to insist on writing garbage, at least make it grammatically correct.

Ask the bartender for a recommendation. "What do you want?" "Can I please have something big and cool looking?" "You're nine years old aren't you? How did you get in here?"

In at number seventeen, "a lone woman" makes a solid stab at challenging "are you alone" for the most outwardly menacing turn of phrase on the list.

Then, if she says she doesn't have email, why not try fax, pager, or carrier pigeon?

Most women won't return a call from a guy they met in a club, so your best bet is to bulk order. Get as many phone numbers as possible. Fuck it, don't even go out, just pick up the Yellow Pages and start working your way through from A.

"Circle back around" is probably supposed to make you sound like a shark. It doesn't. It makes you sound like a broken mobility scooter.

Look at his eyes. Nobody should ever look like that when they are sending an email. The purple jacket is off, probably slung over the back of his IKEA computer chair, while he sits there in his pants frantically drooling over messages to the poor unsuspecting souls he badgered for their work emails last night. Also, what is the obsession with emailing women? Didn't realise Gmail was such an aphrodisiac.

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Well thanks for telling me that now, at step 22, when I've already spent my evening approaching girls with the opening lines "is this the event I'm looking for?" and "are you alone?"

This is probably the only piece of salient advice on the entire list, because if you talk about yourself, you will end up opening the Pandora's box of creepy shit that have led you to talking to her in the first place. Also, note the quotations around "good chemistry", because an actual human connection is a construct invented by chicks.

That's it guys, step 24. The final key to finding the woman of your dreams. So having gone through all other 23, played your game perfectly, you've finally got her in conversation. Now all you have to do is behave like a prick and make her feel terrible about herself. Why? Because women want to know you have a higher status than themselves. Feeling belittled is sexy as fuck. Awwww yeah.

Everything above is obviously terrible, and obviously stupid. What sets out to be a smooth-talking set of dating tips, comes off more like a badly written manual written by aliens for aliens pretending to be humans. It is also a sad (albeit unsurprising) affirmation of modern attitudes, that a crowd-sourced website contains such poisonous ideas, the biggest of which being that women represent this big homogenous group that can be played like programming a computer, or training a dog. The only real advice for picking up girls is to stop reading guides on how to pick up girls. In fact, stop saying "pick up girls". Stop living in a world where you think sex is something you deserve. Don't walk into a club looking like a pre-pubescent gameshow host, only to slide around with a notebook asking everyone if they are alone. Follow WikiHow's steps and you can guarantee you will end your night, slumped in a chair, crying into your big, cool looking drink.

Somebody get him a napkin.

THUMP's Guide to Clubbing

Angus picks up girls on Twitter.