The 10 Worst Pickup Lines We've Ever Heard

Mine came courtesy of a friend of a friend I met at a going away party. He’d gotten out of rehab for hard drugs that very day, and was rocking a floppy-haired, baby-faced, sweet but deeply wrong vibe. As the drinks rolled on, he noticed – and dug – my overcrowded, crooked dental work – and delivered the closer:

“I want to lick your teeth.”

It somehow managed to be so gauche and twisted all at the same time – that I let him – and quickly moved on to kissing just to make it stop!

Lest you think only guys deliver shitty lines:

i was new to san francisco, so pretty excited when a few acquaintances offered to take me out to a (now defunct) bar/restaurant in the castro known for garlic fries and events for single queer women. i realize now that the two aren’t really the greatest combination (garlic breath and awkward introductions, mm), but i digress. anyway, as i’m sitting at the bar, trying desperately to make eye contact with a girl standing a few yards away, an older, clearly drunk woman slides up to my right. she looked fifty-ish, had clearly drawn on upside-down “v” eyebrows, and smelled STRONGLY of booze. when she started trying to make conversation, i smiled politely and continued eating my fries. i suppose she was a firm believer in “if at first you don’t succeed…”, because she decided to place her hand on my upper thigh, squeeze and declare, “I AM THE LAST LIVING RELATIVE OF JOHN F. KENNEDY”. which was confusing because a) i knew it to be untrue and b) even if it were true, i’m not sure why she would think that it would make me go home with her.

Here’s one from a professional:

Back in the days of my youth, 3 years ago, I was in Italy for the summer. There was a pretty cute waiter at the hotel we were staying at, and after his shift, he came with some friends to meet me and my friends at a local bar. We were drinking, and he was being flirty in that way that some Italian guys are practically professionals (some more than others apparently) at when around American women. Anyway, at first, he busted out a line that worked great on me: “I have cannabis. We go to the beach?”

So I went with him to the beach, with our mutual posses, to partake of some fine Italian herb. I was playing a little hard to get (mostly because I had to pee, and that was more at the forefront of my mind than sexy times), so to win me over, he decided to bust out the real lady-killer line: “I am gigalo.”

I’m not sure whether he wanted to discuss rates or impress me with his professional skills, but either way it didn’t work.

And this one happened in a professional setting:

I was working a temp job at a business expo. Really tedious job, standing on my feet all day handing out pamphlets. Every time there was a lull in the crowd, the guy in the next booth would come over and try to make conversation. I was getting a really weird vibe, so I was polite, but tried to convey an attitude of complete disinterest. About the 4th or 5th effort at conversation, he walks up to me and says, completely out of the blue, “You know, some people don’t think there is anything wrong with child pornography, particularly if it’s your own kids. What’s your opinion on that?”

The really creepy thing about the above is that I think I’ve actually heard it before, but I was too afraid to Google lest I end up on some sort of watchlist. As an antidote, here’s one I actually like:

I was walking down the Strip, wearing my trusty librarian glasses. Some guy turns around and yells, “damn, sexy librarian! Make me wanna check my books in late!”

But every contest has to have a winner (or two). So here’s the first, a regular crap pickup from a dude worthy of two tickets to Planned Parenthood NYC’s Summer, Sex, and Spirits party at the Museum of Sex (tonight!):

This is a tale that begins in my first month at college. I was part of a very small writing program, so all of us majors got close pretty quickly. One particular guy, whose writing I respected, invited me to a Johnny Depp-a-thon at his dorm, where we could go on about how dreamy he was. A common refrain was “Oh how I would seduce him.” Between this and the fact that I went to an extremely gay friendly school with a large GLBTQ population, I assumed that this friend was gay. Upon parting after that first outside-of-class hang-out, I said, jokingly and in a totally unsexy way, “Well, if you ever want to hang out so I can seduce you, gimme a call!”

The next day, I get a call from said dude. “Hey,” he said in a quavering voice. “I’m feeling kind of lonely-do you mind if I come over and seduce you?”

Thinking that something bad had happened and he needed emotional support, I said, “Sure! Come over!”

Within a few minutes he’s at my dorm. Within a few minutes in my room, it became obvious that a serious miscommunication had taken place. But this is not a story of miscommunication. This is a story of bad pick-up lines/gambits.

So, feeling bad that I had accidentally led this guy on, I cheerfully informed him that we could still hang out platonically if he was game.

“Oh yes,” he purred. For the record, this purr-a breathy, Marilyn Monroe-esque tone-continued throughout our conversation. He then continually pushed my hair behind my ear as I spoke to the point that I retreated to my bed (a top bunk) to get away from him. “You’re fidgeting with your hair. Now why is that?”

“Oh. Just something I do I guess.”

“I think it’s intensely Freudian.”

That he couldn’t read it as discomfort is mind-boggling. “Did I tell you I’ve decided to change my name?”

“You hadn’t! What will it be?”

Rather than tell me, he sauntered (literally) over to my desk and wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

an₂

“Is that pronounced ‘Ahn’? Like, ‘Ahn the 2nd?'”

“It’s pronounced Atrophy.”

“Oh. Um. Cool.”

“Is that doing it for you?” (I wish I could say this last line was said jokingly. Dear reader, it was not.)

Conversation turned to classes, even though his tone and body language was still firmly entrenched in the mode of cheesy seduction. I mentioned I was taking an anthropology course.

“Oh anthropology is just so sexy,” he informed me, touching my hair again (he was leaning on my bed now, and I continually looked to my wide open door for any of my hallmates to interrupt the moment). “My favorite civilization is the Iroquois;” he smiled and leaned in and in an even purr-ier, breath-ier whisper explained “because they have no gender.”

Thank God at that moment my hallmate came in.

And slightly shorter, but no less awesome, winning the lady in question H-Spot’s How Players Do It DVD guide to woman-pleasing:

I was 18, spending most of my last pre-college summer in a half-slimy/half-renovated hotel in a small town in Iowa. The hotel had been continuously operational since 1853, and had gone through many reinventions of itself. […] It was the type of place I got asked questions like, “How much are your whores?” and “Can I taste you?”, and had requests to vacuum a resident’s room in the evening instead of the morning because he “kept different hours”. I had to knock loudly on one door to make sure the man who lived there was not masturbating when I entered, and would rotate between two sets of sheets for another man who always managed to leave them bloody. As exciting as it was to step into each of these rooms and try to scrub them down, my favorite part of the job was sitting at the desk at night, reading and greeting people when they walked in the lobby. Most people who came in were actually going to the hotel’s bar, and I quickly became friendly with the regulars.

One such regular was a thirty-something man I’ll call Clem. He was incredibly cheery, especially for a man who was missing a few teeth. He had a ponytail and wore overalls, and would always stop by the desk to ask what I was reading that night. He started out just stopping by in the evenings, but soon realized he could see the work schedule over my shoulder and started showing up on Saturday mornings, where he would have some lame excuse about cutting over to the diner (that had a main entrance a few feet down the sidewalk from our lobby’s entrance). By August, he decided to try to bring me breakfast or dinner (usually offered from McDonald’s), and one day, he came up to me and asked, “So, uh, have you ever been trapshooting? Because I’m going this weekend and it’d be cool if, you know, you come along. We could actually go hunting, too, you know — the place I’m going has a shitton of squirrels. Don’t need to bring any food with.”

That offer did NOT work, I assure you. Trapshooting is not the way to a woman’s heart, not even in Iowa.

Amen.

Summer, Sex And Spirits 2010 [Planned Parenthood NYC]
How Players Do It [H-spot.com]

Earlier: The Worst Pickup Line You’ve Ever Heard

Image via GLUE STOCK/Shutterstock.com.