“You’re an excellent flirt,” he said. I already knew that, but it was nice to have it confirmed by a bon fide flirting expert, a man who runs workshops on body language, dating techniques and the mating game. We’d done some work together in the past, and he’s known me for over a year, but this was the first time he’d seen me in a social situation, and I, as is my habit, had been flirting up a storm.

“Of course, you’ve read all the books,” he added. “So it’s not surprising.”
It’s true, I have, but only since I’ve been writing for Hot Press and I’ve been flirting for a lot longer than that. My bookshelves have a number of tomes on body language, because I find it a fascinating subject, but I’ve never once tried to put any of this information to practical use – I’ve never felt the need to.
The entire Sexton clan are flirts. My parents flirted outrageously with one another through thirty-nine years of marriage – airing their clean laundry in public as Oscar Wilde put it. My brother started trying to chat up teenage girls from about the age of ten; my younger sister obtained a PhD in the Dynamics of Advanced Flirting by sixteen; while my older sister makes up for lack of subtlety by being a force of nature – rather like a hurricane.
Given all of this, it’s no surprise that I am a flirt. It’s hardwired into me, both by nature and by nurture. Human beings learn through imitation. As children we watch our parents and siblings and – to an extent at least – we mirror their behaviour. Having seen my parents wriggle out of traffic fines or be offered upgrades using nothing more than charm and a well-timed smile, I learnt early on that flirting is a useful tool. But as a teenager I had no idea how to put this into practise with the opposite sex.
My friends were full of advice on how to behave around boys, but mostly this seemed to involve hair-twirling and acting stupid – neither of which I was prepared to do. I may have been desperate, but I was a still a feminist. Besides which, my mother didn’t act like a fluffy-headed moron and my father seemed to adore her, so I decided to ask her opinion instead. She let me into a little secret – and I’ve been using it to great effect ever since.
I wondered, though, if I was still missing a trick. Body language is a science that has been studied for years and the advice given in books, such as Tracey Cox’s Superflirt, has been tried and tested by millions of people across the globe. So, come Saturday night I decided to do a little experiment and follow her advice.
Well, not in every respect: one of Cox’s more – how shall I put this? – outré suggestions is that you should let your pheromones do the work for you. Each person’s body produces a unique scent, and this helps us attract a suitable mate. To make the most of this, Cox advises using the natural secretions of the vagina, dabbed on where you’d normally apply perfume.
Ms Cox swears by this, but I decided to give it a miss. In a scientific experiment you recreate the same conditions over and over again, changing just one variable at a time, to see how that affects the outcome. Since the group I was seeing this Saturday didn’t overlap with the one from the weekend past, I decide to recreate the same conditions by wearing the same dress and doing my hair the same way; as I’d been wearing perfume the weekend before, I thought it best – in the interests of science – to do so again. The fact that this gave me a good excuse to avoid Cox’s idea was simply a bonus!
Flirt tip number one suggested that I should stop for a few minutes on the threshold before entering a room. This gives you the chance to scan the room for attractive members of the opposite sex, but more importantly, it gives them a chance to see you too.
Before crossing over into the room where my friends were gathered, I stopped, smiled and scanned. Sadly, this was a wasted effort. Nobody appeared to notice, except for a friend, who gave me a quizzical look as if to ask what the hell was taking me so long. Of course, I am short and the pub was crowded. Mmmmm…
Flirt tip number two was the over-the-shoulder-smoulder. According to Cox, women often attract attention by glancing over a shoulder at a man and holding his gaze for a few seconds. I let this loose on a man standing next to me by the bar. When the bar lady came to take his order, he very nicely suggested she help me first. Success! Well, sort of anyway, and certainly a useful trick in a crowded bar.
A classic flirting tip is sucking or licking a phallic-shaped object. This does attract attention – it’s bound to. It’d be hard to ignore a woman performing fellatio on the neck of a beer bottle. A slightly subtler version is to slightly suck on the tip of your finger or on the end of a straw. I gave this one a miss as well, but only because there was no one around that I felt deserved a fake blowjob.
Instead I decided to give ‘mirroring’ a go as it’s far more ladylike. When you like someone you subconsciously signal to him or her that you are on the same wavelength by copying behaviour. This means you sip your drinks at the same time and use similar body language.
I tried this with everyone I spoke to – male and female – and I’m pleased to report that it really does work. You have to be careful though – you don’t want to look like you are mocking the person by copying their every move. But I found that when using mirroring, the initial feeling of nervousness that happens when you speak to someone ‘new’, disappeared a whole lot faster than usual.
Flirt trick number five is to use preening gestures. The most common female preening gesture is playing with the hair, meaning my school friends were onto something with the hair-twirling routine. The funny thing is that although I know I do this when I flirt – I’ve caught myself a number of times –I couldn’t do it on purpose as I felt too self-conscious.
I steeled my courage and tried it on the bar man. But whether it was this, or the fact that I was holding a fifty in my other hand, that attracted his attention, I’m not sure. Thing is, I got served pretty quickly, so I’m not complaining.
Tracey Cox has plenty of other suggestions. Staring deeply into someone’s eyes is a pretty unmistakeable signal that you are interested, as is flashing your eyebrows or lightly touching someone on the arm or shoulder. But I think her easiest trick is the most important of all – listen to what your intended target is saying.
On more than one occasion I’ve lost interest in a man I did find attractive because he’d forgotten or mangled something I’d told him not five minutes earlier. Flirting is a subtle game, and while I don’t mind if someone I’m keen on is giving my body the once-over I’m less than impressed if he can’t keep up his end of a conversation because he’s far too busy looking at my breasts – nice though they are!
But perhaps the reason I like this tip is that it dovetails nicely with what my mother told me all those years ago.
Most people, she told me, love the sound of their own voices – a generalisation, which for the most part, is true. Given this, the very essence of becoming a good flirt is being a good listener. But she added a caveat: find the most interesting man in the room and talk to him.
It works for me every time and the reason is simple: if you genuinely like someone and are interested in what they are saying, your body language automatically reflects this. There’s no need to worry about how frequently you should flick your hair, nor any need to get overly friendly with a bottle of Becks.
But it ever lets me down, I’ll try Tracey’s vajayjay trick and let you know!