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Some basic recommendations:

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Book-Body-Language-Expressions/dp/0553804723/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/What-Every-BODY-Saying-Speed-Reading/dp/0061438294/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&linkId=bd2c9af18031113249e398f82105631e&tag=mysoccom-20

Understanding body language is extremely important. Being able to read other people will give you a tremendous advantage in communication. It can also help you to police your own body language so you're not doing stuff that puts people off, and also so that you communicate in ways that makes them feel comfortable.

As for direct communication... Honestly, I learned most of that from a very good teacher of speech (as in, giving speeches) and from a friend who is quite ugly but does extremely well with women. Self-perception is a lot more important than people think. How you perceive yourself translates into you how present yourself. That takes more work, of course, but knowing this is a good place to start with that.

I also got a great deal from a book on emotional intelligence, but I can't remember what it was called and it was a library loan, so I don't even have it on my bookself to look it up. But I'd say look for books on that topic, as well. I did a quick look and found this one is highly recommended:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0974320625/ref=sspa_dk_detail_1?psc=1

As for websites, there's a lot out there. I'd just Google and see what strikes your fancy.

Good luck with it. In my personal estimation, the body language was the single most helpful thing I've studied. I use it constantly now, and it's just second nature to "read" people.

I’m so, so glad for you. I know what it’s like to shrink the world down to a tiny, bleak, manageable place and it is so awful to be there and not know how to get out. Or even if there is an out.

Honestly, the main reason I browse this sub is because I see a lot of people in a lot of pain, without the internal or external resources to get help. Sure, there are the psycho shitheads, but most are just in a pit and only have anger and self-loathing for company.

It sounds like you have a lot of negative thoughts around women that you can’t shake yet. One really great resource for that is CBT, which you can do on your own. There’s a book called The Feeling Good Handbook which helped me out a ton. You have my full permission to roll your eyes at the incredibly dorky cover image and his goofy stories, but the exercises and the vocabulary were incredibly helpful. The only thing I don’t love about it is he’s somewhat discouraging about meds.

The other one I’ve had recommended to me by several professionals which I haven’t read yet but mean to is The Upward Spiral

The other other online resource I can recommend is this dating advice site geared towards guys. There’s a lot of good advice on building confidence and how to make conversation, and the author thinks women are people.

Also, just watch some women-made stuff: movies, TV, blogs, etc. It’s easy to think of us as an exotic species but we’re just people. Stuff like that can help humanize and make it easier to empathize with us.

Speaking of meds, I didn’t get a good sense of whether you struggle with anxiety or depression. If you do, you can go to a regular ol doctor and talk with them about it. They can prescribe basic stuff that will work for most folks. Meds won’t change you or fix your problems or forcibly make you happy. They will make that spike of fear less and lift a lot of the crushing weight of anxiety/depression.

If your doctor doesn’t take you seriously, find a better fucking doctor.

Therapy is great but it can take a while to find somebody that clicks that you can also afford. I highly recommend it if you can, and also be persistent and don’t settle. There’s a lot of terrible therapists out there and a lot of amazing ones.

Dating apps and websites. Joining social hobbies (that you would like to try regardless), school, parties. Some see an interesting girl out in the public and ask her out. As you are starting, reading dating books gives you more social acuity and confidence as you start to understand the factors that are involved in attraction. I'd recommend "Models" from Mark Manson, the first chapter goes pretty deep into importance of looks and comes to a conclusion (indicated by studies done in social psychology) that looks have less impact in attraction from women to men than few other qualities (like confidence and status, or even just potential for status) that can be self-cultivated. You can find it as a free online PDF here, try the Part 1 of the book and see if you could benefit from it.

>no one tried to tell my that my thinking is wrong

It's a difficult task, because the way our brains work makes personal experience supersede external information that contradict it, even when scientifically, objectively, our experience is... not "wrong" per se, but so incomplete that it veers into "wrong" teritory. I teach people how to get along with people, which is mainly applied psichology and neurology (specifically social neurology), so I come against this feature (it's not a bug, it's a feature) every time. For reference: Daniel Kahnemann's work. For reference: Chris Niebauer's book.

Your brain dupes you (it meakes you wrong, giving you the impression you're right) in several key areas relevant to our discussion here:

1. What You See Is All There Is: our brains operate on the assupmtion they have all the info needed to make good decisions and reach true conclusions, neglecting that there are swathes of information that might be / are relevant and that finally change the outlook completely.
   
2. Our Left-Brain Intepreter has the task to keep the story in our heads logically consistent, not correct. As such, it will gladly add to reality, or substract from it, only to keep the story. Please see this and this.
   
3. To accomplish this task, the LBI resorts to cognitive biases like overgeneralization, personalization, confirmation bias etc.
   
4. Its work is so powerful and so well hidden from conscience that most people, when confronted with science, will readily deny science ("well, that might be true but not for me") than accepting our thinking might be flawed.
   
   In your case, in order to examine what biases are in play and what is their result, I'd start questioning the hidden meaning of your use of notions like "chad", "betabux" and such. It speaks to overgeneralization (with a heavy serving of dehumanization) and confirmation bias.
   
   Humans are unique. There are, of course, trends (sociology doesn't exist for nothing) but so far no human being looks and act exactly like another human being always and in all aspects; more, humans change over time: experience, opinions, world views and behavior shift as time passes. That would be the first step I'd take if I were you: stop working with archetypes and start looking for tiny differences. The world will get extremely rich if you do that.
   
   TL;DR: you're wrong, but your brains won't let you see that and you have to voluntarily challenge it to improve your life quality.
   
   Edited to add: and I didn't even touch the issue of cultural and social norms and conditioning, learned helplesness and many other phenomena that interfere and change all the stuff above.

Well, this may be more niche, but drnerdlove.com helped me with a bunch of mental hurdles.

https://www.amazon.com/What-Women-Want-Tucker-Max/dp/0316375330?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0316375330

This guy was on the Joe Rogan podcast not too long ago, and he mentioned this book. The doctor definitely impressed me, and the premise for this book would be something I would have snapped up back in my formative years. There's plenty of books of a similar type as well.

Honestly, if you were to ask me your appearance is completely fine, but you are pretty young and inexperienced. Fortunately, it just means you have a lot to gain from resources like these.

One thing that does have me worried is your negative perspective towards your appearance. I've had similar issues, and I've reconciled it with a type of body dysmorphia. Is it possible you can have something similar?

Actually, it's true. It's not saying "women get fat" and "men get ripped", but rather men naturally start packing on muscle as school-age kids before and after they hit puberty while women start naturally holding onto fat a bit easier. This doesn't mean that every boy will become the Hulk and every woman a whale, but that they bodies are naturally growing to fit the needs of their sex. I have my materials from Developmental if you want to take a look at them. Here's the book I used and I can give you all the presentations and notes I've accumulated through my time in class.

You can also do some research if you want on your own. If you find anything else that contradicts what my information is telling me, I'll gladly look into it and see if it is based in the realm of science and from a reputable source. If it is, then I'll definitely remember it and take it with me as new information.

Women are not a monolith. Are you attracted to the same qualities in people as everyone else? Nope. Are there women out there who go for those kind of guys. Yeah. Are there women out there who would be turned off by that kind of behavior? Yep. You seem to already know why you are using these ridiculous tactics, and it's not because you think they work. It's because you don't feel valuable enough to "deserve" attention and you need to pretend to be something you're not. I promise you there are people out there who will enjoy you for you. Aside from therapy, I recommend this. Best of luck.

Yeah, I think I do have a dysmorphia. I want to try to treat this myself before going through some kind of therapy though, and I think that's mostly because I don't have any health insurance and don't really have any experience with therapy.

Thinking about reading this,

https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Mirror-Understanding-Treating-Dysmorphic/dp/0195167198/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1526973118&sr=8-2&keywords=bdd

might help me. Thanks for the input.

The DBT book mentioned below is a good one. I'd note that it's a LOT of different exercises so it may seem kind of overwhelming at first, so maybe just try some and focus on a couple that work for you. Not everything will work for everyone, but do try to practice and experiment and I think you'll make some progress. I find many of the mindfulness techniques helpful in bringing the focus to the present moment, instead of worrying about what may happen in future or feeling sadness and regret about bad experiences in the past.

For CBT, I always recommend The Feeling Good Handbook by Dr. Robert Burns. Basically what it helps you do is to reframe your thinking, identify distortions in your thoughts, and allow you to kind of 'talk back' to your negative thoughts. I recommend the handbook because it really helps to put pen to paper and go through the steps in the book.

With both these books, you'll get out of them what you put in. If you just sit and passively read it, you won't get much out of it. But if you really WANT to change and try to follow through with what it says, I think you will see improvements.

>As someone who has worked in research in the past

Sure, carrying a clipboard and harassing people in front of Costco gives you real authority on the matter. Here's a book by the same people that did the study. Since you're "in the biz" maybe it'll be interesting to you.

>Also, you may be any level of ugly, unless you are actually disfigured, there will be people interested on you as long as you have an interesting personality - it doesn't matter how much you say the opposite.

Well funny how I haven't found any of them. Must be my shitty personality, eh? Here's my OkCupid inbox from a few years back where I've used some normie's photos instead of my own, and my original (and rather long) profile content. I also tried the same profile content with my own pics, and hardy got any messages (and those that I did get were not friendly or flirty). Conclusion: F A C E

>first, it is because of society, then I show it's not

You didn't show me shit, you just said what you believe with nothing to support it.

>it's because men are not picky, then I show it's not true

You didn't show me shit, you just said what you believe about yourself.

>then it's because I don't flirt with women, then I show I do

My experience in flirting with women outpaces yours quite a bit. It's just that you don't have the kind of face that repulses people.

>then you know women better than they know themselves, and you know more about flirting than anyone else

I'm an authority on how women react to me. Unless they can detect my horrible personality with their sixth sense (that somehow fails to detect hooking up with an abuser), then they are completely and identically uninterested in me whether I flirt or not and whether I talk or not. Conclusion: F A C E

>And the reason for all of that? Because you cannot accept, not even for 1 second, that maybe, just maybe, your personality and behavior play a role in how people react to you too, and you could spend sometime working on yours just like you've spent 13 years in a gym.

Sure, I accept my personality is (or has become) shitty too, but is it so shitty that no one's ever loved me and it's just a coincidence that my face is ugly? Funny how that works. And funny how a shitty personality is not a barrier for good looking people to get in a relationship.

>I have no time for this victim mentality man, nor does anyone else. Have a good night.

Homophobia: doesn't exist.

Racism: doesn't exist.

Sexism: doesn't exist.

Any person who's being discriminated against should work on their personality instead.

One of the better books on or related to the subject would probably be She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman by Dr. Ian Kerner. It's a real eye-opener and both accessible and useful whether you're a complete novice or already a guru yourself.

There are logical arguments, but I don't have time or inclination to write them here. You might want to read some moral philosophy, or take a class. This is a pretty good overview.
https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Pluralistic-Approach-Moral-Theory/dp/0495006742/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
I think his section on virtue ethics is a little weak, but that is my area.

Check out this book. I had a similar experience with the mental health system, a friend recommended this book, and it put me on the track to recovery. There are copies floating around the internet as well.

Allow me to clarify on my first point: There are no behavioural differences between men and women that cannot be explained by nurture.

I'd direct you towards Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine:
https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244

When I was far younger, I was convince by books like The Male Brain, The Female Brain, Why Gender Matters, Boys Adrift, and Girls on the Edge that sex played an enormous role in behavior and function. I am now very skeptical of that notion. You linked three articles within your earlier post; I read the meta-analysis and the abstracts of the other two and agreed with their findings for the most part: There are substantive physical differences between a male and a female brain. However, this proves little towards behavior. Two brains can have different structure yet function at the same level, accomplish the same goal.

My argument is: Just because a male and female brain have different structure, it does not follow that their functionality is different. That leads to the dangerous psuedoscientific thought that men and women must be better at different things, and thus maintain different spheres, so on and so on. It's the sort of justification scientifically backed sexism uses.

If you want to actually prove to me that the differing structure of male and female brains is a significant cause of behavioral differences, you'll have to do a bit more digging. I would posit that the reason men and women bear behavioral differences is because of the differences in their bodies, which have led to different treatment and power dynamics throughout history.

When the sex-equals-brain-function argument really gets me going is when it starts to suggest that men aren't capable of empathy, or women aren't capable of complex problem solving. That's patently untrue, and it dehumanizes each.

ha! Tanith Lee wrote a sci-fi novel on this very subject, "The Silver Metal Lover," in 1981. It's now a trilogy.

N por the OKCupid studies was in the hundreds of thousands. The guy running the studies is a freak of statistics. Granted, is still slanted by people in online dating, but the N is so big that you can make conclusions at least about internet-based dating (which is very popular in many countries, nowadays the most common way to meet people).

His book: https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offline-Selves/dp/0385347391

Easy.

• Read Jordanetics: https://www.amazon.com/Jordanetics-Journey-Humanitys-Greatest-Thinker-ebook/dp/B07JY9XV38
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7u3Lu-kzgg
  
  If you think Jordan Peterson is not a stupid leftist (he is not a Christian, either) then you do not know anything about him except news headlines.

I really recommend the annotated version

https://www.amazon.de/Models-Attract-Women-Through-Honesty/dp/1463750358