peacocking

The advice arrived on alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) in July 2003 as a reading assignment. A new poster said his clothes were probably not mainstream and was told to “Look into Peacocking. Having something interesting about your appearance is good.” The reply supplied a script with it, a ready answer for when someone asked where the necklace or shirt came from, which explained that he had been told to wear something interesting to give people an excuse to talk to him.

The instructors put it on the syllabus. The reporter behind a 2004 New York Times article (opens in a new window) paid $500 for four nights with the instructor Mystery, and among the topics was dress: he wanted his students to “peacock” more, “or stand out with louder clothing.” In The Game (opens in a new window) the following year it had become a theory, in which “the equivalent of a flashy peacock tail is a shiny shirt, a garish hat, and jewelry that lights up in the dark.”

Under load, the costume does the opening so that the wearer does not have to. It hands the first line of the conversation to the other person and fixes its subject in advance, since the one question it invites is about itself, and the answer has been rehearsed. The cost falls on the conversation that follows, which begins as a question about a hat and has to be steered off the hat by the person who chose it for that purpose. When she asks about it only to be polite, the costume has worked exactly as designed and nobody has learned anything about either of them.