What Is Peacocking and Does It Work?

Peacocks use ostentatious displays to attract a female. Can this same strategy work for human beings? It can, it does, and in this guide you’ll learn just how it does so.

Hey guys. Welcome back.

Today, I’ll touch upon a classic technique in pickup and seduction that is often overlooked—peacocking.

It’s an original technique that Mystery and his crew popularized in the 2000s. The idea is to catch women’s attention by dressing flashy to facilitate openings. This usually involves wearing accessories, flamboyant clothing, or an original dressing style, so you come off as a peacock.

Back in the day, it was one of the most used techniques for night game, and quickly became the clothing style for many active pickup guys. Whenever a guy would dress flamboyantly in a club, people always suspected he must be part of the “community.”

Eventually, as seduction popularity died off, peacocking took a serious hit. It is often a meme-worthy element of pickup and seduction, usually to ridicule pickup and seduction as a whole. “Look at those nerdy clown-looking weirdos!” Often, this criticism was deserving; many of those so-called “pickup artists” (PUA) or “green PUA” (a PUA in training) did look really weird. And their miscalibrated use of gambits, negs (negative remarks), and routines, like magic tricks, gave the entire community an odd image.

However, all these can work if delivered correctly, congruently, and in the right moment and setting.

These guys took the idea of canned material a bit too far. Because they were beginners and entered pickup arenas with a hefty toolbox, memorizing material, they appeared very robotic. Adding to a poor baseline because they lacked fundamentals, pickup and seduction became less popular and was often joke worthy, with the concept of peacocking its primary victim.

Later, the introduction of natural game countered the older pickup style’s overly goofy and robotic aspects. This new approach focuses on mastering fundamentals and represents a positive shift in the game. Natural game aims to teach beginners advanced strategies, gambits and niche routines, particularly men who struggle socially. These men did not have their fundamentals in check. They usually had poor body posture, grooming, and delivery—poor everything. Add a flashy attention-seeking outfit on top of it, and instead of providing them with a degree of edginess or coolness, they looked out of place and easy targets for jokes.

Most pickup material known to the public to this day—and ridiculed by the mainstream—belongs to the Mystery Method. He was the first to promote the idea of peacocking. The popularization of the Mystery Method and its signature concepts like negging, peacocking, and “DHV’in” (demonstrating higher value) is partly due to its popularity within the community and mainstream exposure. The book The Game focuses on the Mystery Method and Mystery himself, in addition to the subsequent TV show The Pickup Artist. Coaching companies erupted in the twilight of this mass popularization, and most sold watered-down copies of the original Mystery Method. Things became worse, as poorly trained, inexperienced men with an advanced system were doomed to failure, leading to a decline in pickup and seduction popularity.

Let’s revisit the concept of peacocking. How can this work today? Why does it work? Next week, we will discuss how to use peacocking.