What Your Creepiness Reveals About Peeking

I've been trying to express how to peek information for years now. But I think I've finally found the perfect analogy.

Ask a woman in your life; they will confirm this. Hell, we actually have women who go to magic conventions now; they'll confirm it too. In fact, they probably had to deal with this a bunch while at the last convention they went to.

Men think they can get away with this.

You can’t. They know.

You'd actually be better off just staring straight at her chest. "Oh my god, that necklace is incredible. What's the story behind that? It's so eye-catching!" (This works best if they’re actually wearing a necklace.)

This furtive glance nonsense isn't fooling anyone. There must be something in our genetic code that spots it immediately. In fact, the quicker you look, the more obvious it is. If I'm talking to someone and they stare off a little over my shoulder or something for an extended period of time, it can seem like they're processing what I'm saying. But if they quickly glance over my shoulder and back, then I know they're actively looking at something.

This is instinctual. But magicians act like they don't understand. "I'll do the Center Tear and look at the information real quickly while I tear it!" But everyone notices the quick glance at the paper. Rapid, darting eye movements grab our attention and are almost universally associated with shifty, suspicious activity. "Hmmm… good point," says the magician. "Oh, I know! I'll look at it really REALLY quickly!"

This is how fucking dumb we are.

I've already written the general rules of getting a peek here, so I won't reiterate them in this post.

But the thing to keep in mind is that the card, the drawing, or the piece of writing is a "hot" object. It's suspect. So if your peek is built on a quick glance (suspicious) towards a hot object (suspect), an audience will almost certainly see through that, even if they don't know precisely how you saw the information.

Next time you're crafting a peek, think of every woman rolling their eyes when you “quickly” glance at their cleavage and remember this post.

[Note: In order to make my points more accessible to the average magician, I will be rewriting every post from the past decade of this site using analogies based on how women are weirded out by your creepiness.]