RN
The framing in the title is the problem, and it is worth saying so before anything else, because everything downstream of it fails.
"Getting in her panties" describes a target with a defence and you with a strategy for defeating it. Run that model and you will spend your effort on persuasion — better lines, better tactics, more persistence at the point of hesitation. Persuasion is precisely the wrong tool. Nobody who is genuinely undecided is converted by it, and someone who was already interested does not need it.
The people who do well at this are not better persuaders. They are doing something structurally different: they generate more first contacts, they read interest accurately, and they exit fast when it is not there. That is the whole method. What follows is the detail.
Volume beats technique, by a wide margin
Almost everyone struggling with this is running a very small number of interactions and trying to raise the conversion rate on each one. That is backwards.
The maths is unkind but simple. If you talk to two new people a month and put enormous weight on each, you are optimising a sample too small to learn from, and the pressure you are applying — to yourself and to them — is itself the thing making it fail. Ten low-stakes interactions a week, most of which go nowhere pleasantly, produce more outcomes and far less anguish than two high-stakes ones.
This also fixes the desperation problem, which is not a mindset issue. Desperation is visible because it is real: it is what wanting something badly and having no alternatives actually looks like from outside. You cannot perform your way out of it. You can dissolve it by having other options, and options come from volume.
Read interest instead of creating it
The single most useful skill here is not charm. It is accurately telling the difference between someone who is interested, someone who is polite, and someone who is stuck talking to you.
Interested looks like reciprocity. They ask questions back. They extend the conversation when it could naturally end. They re-initiate later. They make it easy to find them again. The tells are unglamorous and reliable, and the biggest error is treating politeness as a weak yes. Politeness is what people do to end an interaction without a scene. Someone who is warm but never initiates anything is being kind, not coy.
The old advice about persistence — that women say no out of habit and a real man reads through it — is the direct cause of most of what makes public spaces unpleasant, and it does not even work on its own terms. Treat a no as final and an ambiguity as a no, and you will lose approximately nothing. The false negatives in this system are rare. The false positives are the ones that make you a story someone tells their friends.
Ask directly, early
The awkwardness in dating is almost entirely produced by ambiguity, and ambiguity is a choice.
Say what you want. "I'd like to take you out" is a complete sentence. "Do you want to come back to mine" is a complete sentence. The fear is that directness gets you rejected more often, and it does — it also gets you rejected faster, cheaply, before you have invested three weeks in someone who was never going to. Speed of information is the thing you are buying.
It also removes the entire category of interaction where one person thinks it is a friendship and the other is running a long game. That situation is bad for both of them, and it is created solely by not asking.
Meeting people, and where
Apps are the default and they work, with a caveat that has become more true over time: they are engagement products, and their monetisation depends on you continuing to use them. Optimise for getting off the app quickly. Match, exchange enough messages to establish the person is real and you can talk to each other, propose meeting. Long app conversations build a version of someone that reality then has to compete with.
Everything else is downstream of one principle — recurring shared activity beats one-off encounters. Bars work for people who are already good at this and poorly for everyone else, because the interaction has no context, no repeat exposure and a high noise floor. Anything you turn up to weekly — a class, a team, a hobby with regulars, volunteering — gives you repeated low-stakes contact with the same people, which is the condition under which attraction usually forms. It is slower to start and enormously more productive.
If you are meeting strangers, tell someone where you are going, meet somewhere public first, and arrange your own transport. That is not paranoia, it is the same thing you would do for a used-car sale.
Presentation, briefly
Fit, clean, and dressed like you chose the clothes. That is essentially it, and it is worth about as much as it sounds — a threshold you clear, not a dimension you compete on.
The specific returns are boring: clothes that fit your actual body rather than the one you had at twenty, a haircut from someone who cuts hair for a living, shoes in good condition, and the full dental and hygiene routine. These are cheap, they are entirely under your control, and they are the reason most of the advice about them is unsatisfying — people want a technique and this is just maintenance.
Health, without the misinformation
The legacy version of this article said most infections clear in about a week on cheap or free medication. That is wrong, and wrong in the direction that gets people hurt.
What is actually the case: many sexually transmitted infections produce no symptoms at all, and infections at the throat and rectum are typically silent. You cannot infer your status, or anyone else's, from how you feel or how they look.
Testing has a window period, which is the part most people miss. Chlamydia and gonorrhoea are generally reliable at around two weeks after exposure; HIV testing takes longer, in the region of six weeks for standard lab tests; syphilis can take six to twelve weeks. A test taken the day after a risk tells you about your status before that risk, not after it.
Screening guidance from the CDC and USPSTF recommends HIV testing at least once for everyone aged 13 to 64, annual screening for sexually active people under 25, and annual or more frequent screening for older adults with new or multiple partners. Men who have sex with men are advised to screen at least annually and more often at higher risk, including at the sites of exposure rather than urine alone. Rates of several infections have been rising, which is the practical reason to treat this as routine rather than as a response to a scare.
Condoms, an honest conversation before rather than after, and knowing where your nearest sexual health clinic is. If you take one thing from this section, make it the window period — it is the fact that most confidently-stated "I got tested, I'm clean" claims quietly depend on.
Substances, and a line that is not negotiable
A drink to take the edge off is one thing. The legacy article went considerably further and suggested using substances to improve a partner's mood, with an aside about avoiding accusations afterwards.
To be unambiguous: giving someone anything to lower their resistance is a serious criminal offence, and the fact that the older version framed it as a tactic with a PR risk rather than as what it is tells you everything about the quality of the advice around it. Someone too intoxicated to make a clear decision cannot consent, regardless of what they said earlier in the evening, and the correct response to that state is to end the night.
Getting heavily drunk yourself is a separate and much smaller problem, and it is still a problem — it degrades exactly the judgement this whole article depends on.
Consent as a working tool
Treat it as ongoing information rather than a gate you pass once. Ask before escalating. Watch what the other person's body is doing, not just what they say. Enthusiasm is the standard, and its absence is an answer.
Two specifics that come up constantly: check before introducing anything from porn, because what is common on screen is a produced performance and assuming otherwise is how people get hurt; and remember that a yes to one thing is not a yes to the next one.
Checking in is not the mood-killer it is imagined to be. Being the person who checks is, for a lot of people, the difference between a night they enjoyed and one they endured politely.
What this actually reduces to
Go where people are, regularly. Talk to more of them than feels natural. Say plainly what you want. Believe the answer. Get tested on a schedule rather than in a panic. Never touch the substances-as-strategy idea. Be someone whose company was fine even when nothing happened.
That last one is doing more work than it looks like. Most people who are consistently successful here are not running an approach; they are simply pleasant to be around and unbothered by any individual outcome, which is a thing you get from having a life rather than a technique. The advice industry sells the technique because nobody can sell you the life.