The Bad Boy Experiment

College Picture

This story is about my bad boy experiment.

The idea for the experiment didn’t just come out of the blue. It formed over weeks, months, even years from small observations. I started questioning a core belief of mine, which was that girls didn’t like me because of my short slender body. For a long time, I thought it was the only possible explanation for women rejecting me.

While my dad was a traveling evangelist and mostly absent, he had a large collection of books, mostly Christian philosophy. I believed in honesty, integrity, kindness, and the willingness to forgive other people’s faults. I believed in trying to get along with others. I studied engineering in college, so I considered honest and precise communication to extremely important. I believed the world would be a better place if everybody was helpful and nice. Despite this, I rarely had a girlfriend.

High School Graduation — Age 19 (113 lbs.)

At some point, I discovered TRP (The Red Pill) and I was focusing mainly on PUA (Pickup Artist) stuff. While I was having some limited success in flirting (negging), I still wasn’t getting dates, although I blamed that mainly on poor target selection (but I was trying to practice my skills). A lot of other TRP stuff was just the obvious stuff about improving yourself.

But one thing I read was bothering me. It was the logic in why “Nice Guys” were considered unattractive. The main explanation was that nice guys were weak and using nice guy stuff to try and overcome their weaknesses. While I considered myself to be unattractive, I didn’t consider myself to be weak. I definitely wasn’t an Alpha, but men still respected me. Outside of looks, in most categories, including physical sports, I was easily in the top 10%. In mental categories, I was easily in the top 1%.

On the other hand, I saw stuff written by the ladies saying that nice guys weren’t really nice and that they preferred the bad boys for their strength and honesty.

And while there might be some truth on both sides, I couldn’t reconcile the differences from my observations. My theory was that maybe women perceived niceness as weakness. While this isn’t a problem with most men, I have had incidences where a guy perceived my niceness as weakness, attacked me, then discovered his mistake. I was raised in a rough neighborhood and knew how to fight. I just didn’t believe in fighting. Maybe women were just more susceptible to this false perception than men.

I also saw an attractive girl with a guy that was heavily mistreating her. He was a meth addict with no job. He was short and so skinny that he looked like a holocaust survivor. There was no way this girl could see him as strong and tough. I could have easily crushed him in a fight. He certainly wasn’t a provider type either. Was she just charmed by his bad boy behavior?

It seemed counterintuitive, but maybe being a nice guy was a total turnoff to women. I gave the idea a lot of consideration.

But I wasn’t sure how to test my theory. It just wasn’t in my nature to be mean or cruel. But then I started thinking about something I saw on TV back in 1967. In the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek, Captain Kirk, Uhura, Bones, and Scotty get trapped in another dimension where they have to act like barbarians to survive. Their alternate versions have to act like gentlemen to survive though. When Kirk ask why it was easy for Spock to recognize their alternates while the original team wasn’t recognized by the barbarian Spock, Spock says “It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians, than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men”. It got me to thinking. While it felt totally wrong, I should be able to fake being a bad boy while avoiding any actual physical abuse. Even so, I still didn’t like the idea of deliberately inflicting emotional distress on some ladies.

Age 25 (135 lbs.) — Helping my grandfather with his orange trees

Around this time, I moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii, whites are a minority at around 25% of the population and the local population tends to openly discriminate against them when it comes to hiring. My boss was very open about hating white people, but also had a grudging admiration for our intelligence, especially when working with computers. I was hired as a technician, but he still openly insulted me all the time. I did my best, but also accepted and knew that I could be fired at any time. The point being that I was mentally prepared to lose my job.

So when this semi-attractive lady (let’s call her Alice, not her real name) insulted me over a slight misunderstanding, the final idea formed. I am thinking to myself that Alice is totally out of my league. She will never like me, why am I trying to be nice to her when she disrespects me, I need to practice being cruel and mean. I need to test the “Bad Boy Theory”. Just pretend it’s a game to get past my revulsion in doing it. What can she do anyway? Get me fired by my boss who already hates me? That’s inevitable anyway.

So I did. I made snide remarks about the way she looked. I asked if she was gaining weight. When I saw her smoking, I thanked her for reminding me why she was getting wrinkles and why people shouldn’t smoke. When she had a problem with a complicated formula in Excel, I asked why can I fix it for her when I never took an Excel class, but she took a whole accounting course, and did that mean that she was mentally retarded? I asked if our company got special tax deductions for hiring her since she was damaged. My boss bought certain scrap metals on the side, so when she pulled out a calculator after weighing them, I would quickly do the numbers in my head and yell them out before she could get the answers. Then I would tell the customer (right in front of her) that she is damaged, so we need to always double check. Once, when her computer quit working due to a bad connector, I surreptitiously replaced it, pretended to move the plug while she was watching, then told her that she needs to plug her computer in for it to work. Like I wrote earlier, I was treating the process as a game.

This went on for almost two years. Something happened so that I really didn’t even care anymore about the experiment anymore, but I was still doing it out of habit. Plus I rarely saw her anymore (I didn’t realize it yet, but she was avoiding me). Then something happened.

Another secretary at work came up to me and said Alice has a problem. Her computer hasn’t worked for 3 days. She is just staring at a blank screen. She isn’t doing any work. We told her to go get you to fix it, but she is afraid of you. She just sits there looking depressed.

At this point, I am thinking to myself that I have gone to far and it is time to end the abuse. I go into the main office, quickly determine it’s a bad power supply. I tell her it’s just a bad power supply, not her fault, that I can fix it. It will only take a few minutes.

And she just starts bawling. Not just tears, but gasping breath bawling. Huge emotional distress. I am telling her everything will be okay. Between tears, she is repeatedly telling me that she isn’t stupid. That she knows how to do things. That she isn’t old and ugly. I repeat that everything will be okay now. I tell her that I won’t be mean to her anymore.

I could barely believe the next thing I heard.

Totally out of the blue, she just says it: “If you want, I will go home with you. I will have sex with you”. My mind was reeling. I had treated this lady worse than any other person in my life and now she is offering to go home with me. Is this really how the bad boys get girls? Is this really their secret? They just break them? I felt both disgusted and excited by my discovery. I turned down the offer, but I had no doubt about her sincerity.

So here is my conclusion. Being a bad boy works, but I will never act that way again. I didn’t realize how effective I was with her. Worse, she was fired a couple days later due to recent poor work performance. I never saw her slack at work, she did okay for several years before I arrived, so I am 100% sure that her bad performance was my fault.

The ladies are right about something. A lot of “Nice Guys” are just wolves in sheep’s clothing. Like in the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek, they are barbarians trying to act like gentlemen. But they still don’t have self-control, they don’t recognize social boundaries, they lack empathy. Their “Nice Guy” persona quickly fails. Unfortunately, the ladies can’t separate them from the guys that actually do have empathy and just believe in doing the right thing.

So why did I turn Alice down? I had already found a much better way than being a bad boy.

During this time, I went to the Philippines. As soon as I exited the airport, girls were hitting on me. One just wanted a green card, but said that she would do anything I wanted to get it. Another, worked in government and offered to support me and use her connections to get me a permanent visa if I wanted to stay. Others were just happy to just be with me. In none of these cases, did I have to pretend to be someone else. This experience gave me self-confidence, hope, and a future plan. I would save up a million dollars, then permanently go overseas. It took me nine more years, but I am retired now with a foreign wife that was just happy to live with me when my budget was only $500/month.

But the bad boy experiment taught me that I can set boundaries without being rejected. It gave me confidence. It allowed me to stop hating myself for being short and slender. I remember the first time I firmly told a lady that I wasn’t going to do something that she wanted. It was a small thing, but I felt it was an important step for me in setting boundaries. I thought she would get mad and I wondered if she would leave me. But then she turned to face me, smiled, and said she liked that I was finally sticking up for myself.

She would later become my wife.

Soon to be married