Out of their sight but not my earshot, I overheard the following conversation between two late 20s-early 30s SWPL girls giggling about a man one of the girls recently dated.

***

“Did you check him out?”

“I googled him… got his accounts… {unintelligible}”

[ed: silly me, thinking her question meant to ask if she looked at him before meeting.]

“His accounts?”

“Yeah, you know. Facebook, LinkedIn…Instagram… thank god he didn’t have a Tumblr, as far as I could tell.”

“You should probably check those cheater sites too. You know the ones?”

“I did! I tried those… lol… but there aren’t enough women participating yet.”

“So what did you find?”

“Oh wow, a lot of douchy pictures of him at parties with skanks.”

“Gross.”

“But at least he doesn’t have love children… {unintelligible}.”

“Right!”

“Unless he’s hiding them, but I feel like it would be tough to hide secret kids.”

“I dunno, I dated this guy once who had a son, and I didn’t find out until three months later.”

“Except for the stupid photos…oh yeah, and the creepy military history stuff he collects… he seemed all right.”

“Did you go out with him?”

“Yeah. But he said something weird, which makes me wonder.”

“What?”

“He said I’d make a good event planner for bachelorette parties.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I asked him. He said it was my upbeat vibe, or whatever. He said I had the personality to manage a lot of high maintenance girls. Can you believe that!”

“Oookay.”

“But the thing is, I was at a bachelorette party recently. For my friend. He must have saw the pictures on Facebook. I was wondering the whole time if he was checking out my friends. Like, if we didn’t work out, he’d call one of them up?”

“lol… that’s crazy creeper.”

“Eh…. it’s not a huuuge deal.”

“I guess you didn’t see him again.”

“No, we’ve been on three dates. He’s out there, but kind of funny. Thank god he hasn’t talked about any military stuff.”

***

Folks, you simply cannot make up the utter lack of awareness and pathological solipsism exhibited by today’s modern Western woman. It’s like if you threw a woman into solitary confinement, she would claim the world was banging on the cage door to get in and join her.

The lesson, as if it needed to be stated, is that you can expertly game the post-modern dating market by seeding the online world with self-glorifying disinformation. That is, if you choose to have an online presence. Women may cast a suspicious eye at massive online DHVs, but the power of social proof to redound to a man’s benefit is not a trivial thing; if asked, she’ll express disbelief in your sexyman antics but a part of her inner world will want to believe.

Also, don’t fear the douche. You can be all the douche you wanna be, skanks draped over your arms with a wall of duckbill mouths trumpeting your greatness, and women will come running to discover the “good man” underneath. But if you show the good man right away you’ll get a pat on the shoulder and a bored look.

Your other option is zero net presence. ZNP is the safe alternative, and it will certainly stoke curiosity in women in this day and age of pajama-concocted character story lines uploaded to social media megacorp spy machines. But it will also invite more questions than you may be comfortable batting away. If you prefer to go more with the cultural flow, you’ll have to manage your online presence. Welcome to the age of endless self marketing.