This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
My article on Pickup and Seduction Techniques for Feminists is attracting some controversy. Scootah argues:
I see why some of this advice feels at first glance like it’s gender liberational, or productive. But honestly, I think if you dig into it a bit – this is awful advice and not something that I think would really help a guy who’s trying to figure out the dating/picking up girls thing.
Scootah argues that certain ideas in the seduction community are “creepy”, “predatory”, or even “sociopathic.”
While Scootah raises several potential problems with pickup, his net for “predatory” behavior is drawn so widely that I have to wonder if he would call pickup artists (PUAs) “creepy” for saying that the sky is blue, or predatory for helping old ladies across the street. By using words like “creepy,” he is engaging in the overgeneralized and negative views towards male sexuality that Clarisse Thorn recently observed.
Many of the critiques Scootah makes about the seduction community already exist in the community itself with their own jargon (e.g. avoiding being a “social robot” or “outcome dependent”), and some of the solutions he presents are things the seduction community already advises.
Scootah’s comments have given me a chance to get up on my soapbox about a lot of ways in which I think the seduction community is misunderstood. We’ve begun a detailed discussion in the other thread, fully of some enjoyable ranting exchanged by Scootah and myself. I’m now going to move it over to this new thread.
The conversation is too long for me to be able summarize, but I will quote a few key disagreements:
Scootah said:
I wish PUA’s would give that advice as something like ‘Don’t be the guy who needs to get laid tonight. Don’t be the guy who’s only in the bar to hook up. Don’t base your self image or your self esteem on your sexual conquests. Go out to have a good time. Hang out with your friends, meet some new people, relax and understand that even if you go home alone – it’s still a good night. If you meet someone, and if you connect with them in a way that might become sexual – that’s awesome – but don’t make that your focus in life, or you’ll end up creepy, needy and codependant and no-one will want to spend time with you.’
Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if PUAs would give advice like:
Think about what you would want an interaction with a girl to be like if there was no need to get sex. Let’s say that sex was a given. You did not need to do anything tricky or run ‘game’ to score. How would you like that interaction to be? Myself I want it to be fun, exciting, relaxed, playful and sharing with each other willingly. Now think about how you can make that happen. Would you use tricks or be sneaky to get a girl to be that with you? No, that would be counter productive and/or unnecessary work. You would instead lead her by being fun, relaxed, sharing, or whatever you want the interaction to be like yourself and learn to allow and encourage her to be that as well.
or:
In long term, build a frame where you are the ‘center piece’ of your life,
meaning that nothing can make you happier than your own self improvement. So when things start to go well with a girl, you can focus more like “Haha I’m getting good at this.. girls are really starting to dig me!” rather than “OMG does she want me.. I sure hope she does.. now what can I do to make sure she wants to have sex with me?”
Oh wait, PUAs did give this advice… and one of those quotes is from my original post (the other one is from here).
There is indeed a tension (that can sometimes even be a contradiction) in pickup about learning how to increase your chances of getting the outcomes you want, and not getting too obsessed with the outcome. PUAs are aware of the pressures from themselves or the community to perform, and speak of avoiding “outcome dependence.” Some guys actually complain of accidentally taking this attitude too far, and damaging their motivation.
Scootah said:
Direct Approaches – Paraphrased as communicate clearly and don’t try and mask your intentions behind lies, this would be awesome advice. But it’s still reducing relationship formation to a numbers game. Which just seems sociopathic to me.
Relationship formation is a numbers game. For both genders. You have to interact with a certain number of people before you find someone you are matched with. Recognizing this fact is not sociopathic.
Why is the word sociopathic coming up, anyway? Sociopaths stereotypically are strategic and pragmatic in social interaction, but they are hardly unique. Salespeople are pragmatic. And plenty of women are strategic (see Cosmo, or The Rules, for example). Even though the strategic approaches employed by men, women, and salespeople can be problematic, it’s just too much of a stretch to call them “sociopathic.”
It’s not about being honest and having integrity and confidence – it’s about working through as many ‘targets’ as you can so that you have the best odds of finding someone who’ll buy into your routine. It only works if you’re attracted to everyone. Wouldn’t it be better to be discerning and actually invest something in the approach – it sucks if you get knocked back – but when you are accepted – you’re being accepted by someone you’re genuinely into rather than just by the first owner of a vagina who didn’t reach for the pepper spray.
Dating is about working through as many “targets” as it takes to find someone who buys into your “routine.” This is true of everyone: male, female, gay, or straight. We just don’t normally put it in those terms in polite society.
And it’s not creepy because it’s technical. It’s creepy because of the motivations and tones of the material. It’s not advice about self improvement – it’s advice about programming your behaviour to engineer a result – which isn’t a bad thing if you’re teaching people to be more productive at work – but it’s creepy as hell if you’re trying to help people connect sexually.
Pickup is absolutely about self-improvement. Self-improvement, and programming your behavior to engineer a result, aren’t mutually-exclusive. In fact, they are highly overlapping. Sometimes, the best way to achieve a certain result is to improve yourself. Sometimes, to improve yourself, you need to figure out how to achieve certain results.
Language such as “programming your behaviour to engineer a result” indeed sounds “creepy” according to current social norms that penalize honest discussion of exactly how social interaction works. Over the long-term, I certainly don’t think that PUAs should think about women and social interaction purely through engineering or scientific metaphors. There is potential alienation and lack of empathy possible from such an attitude. Perhaps we do have some common ground on this point.
But such language isn’t evil; it’s just another way of looking at things, and put them in terms that nerdy guys can understand.
But learning how to hide the fact that you’re an intolerable troglodyte isn’t a good way to go about conquering your social problems. Perhaps instead, learn to not be so intolerable and unlikable. Pretending that you’re something your not is a contemptible way to get laid, regardless of the specifics of the lie.
Do you really think PUAs are telling guys who are intolerable and unlikable to stay that way, and merely learn to act like they are not? PUAs are advising these guys to change. Tyler’s post I quoted doesn’t just tell guys to change their behaviors, it tells them to change their attitudes. Furthermore, one of the best ways to change your attitudes is to change your behaviors (see this study, for example).
I see why some of this advice feels at first glance like it’s gender liberational, or productive. But honestly, I think if you dig into it a bit – this is awful advice and not something that I think would really help a guy who’s trying to figure out the dating/picking up girls thing.
Don’t be desperate and don’t be needy is excellent advice. But that isn’t the advice given. Or at least not the subtext that a reader is likely to take away. The idea being presented isn’t to relax and be easy going and calm and accept sex as something awesome that happens if you connect with someone in that way – it’s instructions on how to hide the truth of your experience and fake your way into someone’s pants.
I wish PUA’s would give that advice as something like ‘Don’t be the guy who needs to get laid tonight. Don’t be the guy who’s only in the bar to hook up. Don’t base your self image or your self esteem on your sexual conquests. Go out to have a good time. Hang out with your friends, meet some new people, relax and understand that even if you go home alone – it’s still a good night. If you meet someone, and if you connect with them in a way that might become sexual – that’s awesome – but don’t make that your focus in life, or you’ll end up creepy, needy and codependant and no-one will want to spend time with you.’
Attract and Comfort before seduction is also excellent advice. But the delivery is creepy – it reads like advice on how to mask your scent and conceal your purpose long enough to leap out and surprise your prey. I’d again give that advice as ‘It’s not a race to see who can hump someone’s leg first. It’s not going to make anyone feel comfortable or at ease with you if you’re trying to get into their pants before you have any kind of personal chemistry. Talk to someone and get comfortable with them and see if there’s some mutual attraction before you try and convince them to go to bed with you. Stop thinking of women as just the most desirable available vagina and try and remember that girls have personalities too. Sex with someone you like (rather than just like looking at) is awesome.
Social Vibing – Wow, that’s advice for Autistic people. It seems like it could be rephrased just as ‘Work with your therapist’. Again it’s also got that feel of creepy, predatory manipulation. At the very most – surely this advice could be ‘Converse pleasently with the people who you might like to explore your sexuality with’.
but didn’t realize that you were actually REINFORCING to the girl that you are not socially compatible.
Ignoring the lead in and the implications of severe social maladaption in someone who needs advice on how to just have a pleasant conversation, the mistake isn’t reinforcing that you aren’t socially compatible. The mistake is that you ARE socially incompatible and yet you want to have a sexual relationship with this girl. How the hell is that going to work if you can’t even have a pleasant conversation? Either find someone you ARE actually socially compatible with – or try and think about what makes you socially incompatible? Are you too uptight/fixed in your views/dogmatic/intolerant/geeky? Learn to actually be socially flexible enough that you’re compatible with some of the people you’re attracted too. Don’t try and hide what you are, working on making yourself better so that people actually are interested in you and able to relate to/communicate with you – instead of constantly trying to improve the falsehoods you present to try and get laid.
Direct Approaches – Paraphrased as communicate clearly and don’t try and mask your intentions behind lies, this would be awesome advice. But it’s still reducing relationship formation to a numbers game. Which just seems sociopathic to me.
The idea behind these types of approaches is that you either boom or bust. If the woman reacts negatively, then he wastes very little of either person’s time.
It’s not about being honest and having integrity and confidence – it’s about working through as many ‘targets’ as you can so that you have the best odds of finding someone who’ll buy into your routine. It only works if you’re attracted to everyone. Wouldn’t it be better to be discerning and actually invest something in the approach – it sucks if you get knocked back – but when you are accepted – you’re being accepted by someone you’re genuinely into rather than just by the first owner of a vagina who didn’t reach for the pepper spray. I understand really wanting to get laid – but running a numbers game smacks of a kind of pathetic desperation that has to make it incredibly hard to look yourself in the mirror afterward.
The statement of intent – again this goes back to the communicate clearly and don’t try to mask your intentions behind lies thing. I agree – communicating clearly is awesome – but the described behavior is awful and the reasoning is still predatory – it’s just about culling the herd down so that you can find the first set of girl parts that they can touch without any awkward screaming. The sameadvice to take the reader to a much healthier place would be ‘There’s a point between chatting and being friendly, and flirting. One of you needs to put yourself on the line and risk rejection by making it clear that you want this to go somewhere else. Rightly or wrongly, guys are typically expected to take the first overt step in this part of the mating dance. Most girls will give you non verbal cues to let you know that you can proceed with this – but you usually need to put yourself out there and own the risk of rejection. It’s a judgment call how to go about this, make a joke, pay her a compliment, invite her back to your place for a coffee, it’s all about letting her know that you want something more. Judging how to proceed is difficult – and making a joke or paying her a compliment is a low pressure way forward – it lets everyone back away without feeling pressured or hurt. Inviting her back to your place avoids any of those protections and you risk a rough rejection or abrupt end to the flirting if you’re pushing harder than she’s comfortable with.
What you say is up to you, some guys will apply chapstick and make some crack about smooching, some guys will just skip straight to ‘So would you like to go somewhere?’ – deciding how to go forward is all about judging the mood and the tone and figuring out how comfortable the person you’re with is. People, and the lead up to sex with people, is too complicated for you to be a one trick pony, and trying to replicate someone else’s style instead of figuring out your own, is a great way to spend a lot of time jerking off to internet porn instead of hanging out with people who like you.
Maybe you’ll tell her that after you first saw her, you thought you’d forgotten how to breath. Maybe you’ll tell her that getting to know her has been the best part of your night. Maybe you’ll tell her that watching her eat that banana is driving you crazy. Maybe you’ll pretend to be disappointed that she’s busy later on, and if she says that she’s not busy later on, you’ll waggle your eyebrows and ask if she wants to hang out with you, or maybe she’ll say that she’s busy tonight, but she’d love you to call her for a rain check. Cheeky or vulnerable, funny or sincere, subtle or direct – it doesn’t matter as long as it suits you and it doesn’t send her reaching for the pepper spray. You just want to let her know that you’re interested in something more and let her guide the conversation towards something more, or let you know that she’s not interested in anything more. Everyone tells lame jokes or makes a cheesy gesture sometimes when they’re on edge and trying to navigate chemistry and sexual tension to move past flirting into going somewhere. But it doesn’t matter – the other person is almost always as nervous as you are, and usually flattered that you’re interested even if they don’t return the interest. Sincerity and genuineness mean far more than the actual words – as long as you’re not a complete troglodyte.
I guess that when the next DSM goes out, Asperger Syndrome will be considered to be part of the Autistic Spectrum, as opposed to the “light” end different-diagnosis it is now…but yeah, I don’t have a therapist and if I was a guy, this would be very good advice on how to approach a girl without seeming too formal.
It’s even good advice on how to be more informal in friendly dealings. Not that I can’t “have fun”, but my idea of fun has little to do with hanging out with people or doing small talk. My experience there is very low and very bad (trying to be social in school has only resulted in my being excluded from social stuff, same for work). So advising me to be less purposeful and more informal is just plain good…if I can pull it off.
It can be interpreted your way…or it can also be interpreted this way:
Don’t get stuck on someone if they are not interested; this leads to one-itis with someone who has no interest. Lots of efforts, frustrations and ultimately resentment against the woman a la Nice Guy that feminists complain about.
How dare someone give useful advice to autistics such as myself, and in public, no less, where neurotypicals can read it and get creeped out.
Welcome, Scootah. I’ve enjoyed some of your posts I’ve run into in other places.
Unfortunately, I think this particular post is pretty misguided, and I’m going to have to rip it up. Your post just seems to contain a bunch of assumptions about things you have little knowledge of, and you seem to insist on characterizing certain practices in the seduction community in a more cynical light than I think is warranted (particularly cynicism towards male sexuality). I like that your post being a bit provocative and challenging, and I’m going to attempt to return the favor.
How do you know what kinds of advice are given in the seduction community, and what men are likely to take away from it? What exactly is your exposure to the seduction community and your knowledge of PUAs?
I get tired of people thinking that they suddenly know all about pickup and what PUAs think just from a small brush with community. Unless you’ve done a college course-worth of reading, you (and everyone else) does not have a good picture of what the seduction community actually is. I sympathize with how feminists feel about challenges to feminism.
Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if PUAs would give advice like:
or:
Oh wait, PUAs did give this advice… and one of those quotes is from my original post (the other one is from here).
There is indeed a tension (that can sometimes even be a contradiction) in pickup about learning how to increase your chances of getting the outcomes you want, and not getting too obsessed with the outcome. PUAs are aware of the pressures from themselves or the community to perform, and speak of avoiding “outcome dependence.” Some guys actually complain of accidentally taking this accident too far, and damaging their motivation.
You can read the advice that way if you want to. You could also read it as being considerate of women’s feelings. So which is the motivation, effectiveness, empathy, or both? That depends on the individual PUA. And no, you can’t read PUAs’ actual attitudes directly off their language.
Personally, I don’t believe that the actual behaviors advocated (limiting display of sexual intent until after the other person is attracted and comfortable) deserve such a negative description as you give them. Being tactful, or even tactical, about when you display sexual intent is not like hiding behind the bushes and jumping out at “prey,” unless, of course, you already have a view of male sexuality as predatory.
Anyway, is the woman really in the dark about what’s going on? Does she really have no idea that your evil male sexuality is lurking behind the bush? PUAs don’t think women are that naive. Everyone knows that men are visual, and that men often approach women out of sexual interest. By “hiding” your sexual intent until later, you are not “deceiving” a woman of the possibility of your interest, you are communicating: “hey, I’m interested, but I’m not going to make sexual advances unless you show some interest in me.”
Yes, avoiding showing certain types of interest can be taken too far by PUAs. Again, this is another case where this is a balance, and PUAs are trying to find it.
It’s advice for nerdy people. Nerdiness is sometimes conceptualized as overlapping the autistic spectrum, but if it’s just not true that only people with clinical issues need this sort of advice. There are lots of intelligent people with slightly below average social skills who would benefit from this sort of advice.
Therapists can be more helpful than the seduction community for dealing with clinical anxiety issues. Yet therapists aren’t so useful for teaching social skills to people who are socially functional but not socially adept.
It’s just a description of intentional social influence and social skills. Yes, it sounds weird to talk about social interaction in such a technical, mechanical manner, and to some people, it sounds creepy. Some of the particular terms PUAs use have negative connotations (perhaps because PUAs don’t care about the connotations, or because neutral terms don’t exist). Yet this advice isn’t hurting anyone, and its only sin is violating social norms for how we talk about social interaction. PUA discussion violates a lot of social norms, but what PUAs actually do violates very few moral norms.
To me, the norm that it’s “creepy” to analyze social interaction strategically is what’s really creepy. That norm just entrenches a caste system of social skills. Everyone engages in social influence for their own advantage all the time. People like to believe that they aren’t, but they are.
It’s not sociopathic for PUAs to discuss the mechanics of how to do what socially-skilled people of either gender already do all day long. People who resist discussion of self-benefitting social influence are not somehow more virtuous.
Yes, this scientific attitude in a lot of pickup theory can alienate guys from relating to people. This is a known problem, and it’s called being a “social robot.” Like with “outcome dependence,” the critique you make is not only present in the seduction community, but it has its own piece of jargon! If you wanted to say that the intra-community critiques are inadequate, that would be a reasonable argument (and there are several places where I would make such an argument myself), but you would need to acknowledge that these critiques exist. You can’t do that yet, because you don’t know they exist, and you can’t predict that they exist, because your model of pickup is wrong.
No, this advice would not work for nerdy people, because they don’t understand how to engage successfully in informal conversation. You have to break down in a technical language that nerdy men will understand. The way you put it, along with conventional talk about “being yourself,” or “confidence,” is only meaningful to people who already have attained a certain level of social skills; to smart, technical people without those social skills, it is far too general, un-actionable, and airy-fairy.
If only someone would invent a technical language to describe social interaction so that nerdy people could catch up in social skills! If only we had a community where they could ask for advice, receive detailed examples, and get their attempts analyzed! Oh wait…
We aren’t talking about severely socially maladapted people; we are talking about people who are at least slightly nerdy.
TylerDurden is saying something completely different from what you think he is saying. He is advocating against thinking that you need a “presupposition” or “excuse” to hang out with someone. Let’s look at what you quoted in context:
You need to socially vibe and connect with people, not just discuss defined “issues” or “topics” in an intellectual manner. If you talk too much about “issues” in an impersonal manner, and don’t do enough vibing on an emotional level, then you will make the other person think that you two aren’t socially compatible. That’s what he is saying.
Many nerdy people don’t have the concept of talking about “whatever” in order to vibe, they think that communication is for sharing ideas and facts, and don’t understand how it can be about sharing emotions. This post attempts to give them that concept so that guys can be socially compatible with a wider range of women. (Of course, socially skilled people may not have a concept of “vibing” either, because it’s just what they do without being aware of it, though they do perceive other people as “weird” or “uptight” if they can’t vibe back.)
A potential worry is that guys will learn to act like they are vibing, without actually vibing. I don’t think that’s a very realistic worry, because it’s very hard to create an emotional connection with someone without authentically emoting.
More later. Sorry if I sound a bit ranty… I do appreciate these subjects you’ve brought up.
@Recall – To clarify, I’m a highly functional aspie. And I’m all for giving advice to people on the Autistic spectrum – wrongplanet.net has some incredibly useful resources. But advice for Autistics isn’t (or at least god, shouldn’t be) advice for guys in general. Fundamentally – the vast, overwhelming majority of guys – aren’t autistic and advice for autistic people isn’t suitable for them. And likewise, generalised advice for guys isn’t a good way to treat social maladaption or any condition on the autism spectrum. Credentialed professionals can actually help – taking advice from PUA’s when you need real help is a disaster looking for a place to happen.
@Hugh Ristik – How do I know what kinds of advice are given in the seduction community? Well, I read the example quotes that you included. Since they’re supporting the argument and clearly published in this article – it’s pretty easy for me to interpret them and comment on the subtext.
If it’s relevant, I’ve been involved in publishing some quite well known stuff. My writing has never been more than an inclusion in better known publication sources – but I’ve read and edited pre-publication copies of several books relating to the PUA/Fratire genre – including some that have been adapted for visual media after making best seller lists. I’ve published quite a bit of blog material and staffed forums attached to some reasonably well known names. I’ve corresponded as an editor and in discussion/exploration of topics with several people who’s names most PUA community members would know. I’ve read extensively into the PUA thing in relation to other material that I wrote or edited – partly because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and partly because I have a certain morbid fascination with train wrecks.
focus more like “Haha I’m getting good at this.. girls are really starting to dig me!”
See, again, I think that’s a creepy focus. You’re basing a self image assessment on other people. Focus on ‘I’m Happy, I’m having a good time’ and hope that ‘good people enjoy my company’ is part of that (which it almost always will be) and that will include building the dynamics that lead to healthy and successful sexual interactions. The advice surrounding the quotes isn’t about self improvement and finding success through personal growth – it’s all about being a predator, hunting vagina’s with feet and trying to circumvent the nasty personalities that keep you away from those vaginas.
In terms of reading it how I want – I can read Mein Kampf as a social governance guide as well, but an idiot can see the context. And even if a PUA is being considerate of women’s feelings – they’re only being considerate because it further’s a predatory agenda. I hear big game hunters are considerate of the feeding a breeding cycles of Leopards – but it doesn’t change the nature of what they’re doing.
And no, you can’t read PUAs’ actual attitudes directly off their language.
You know what, I can come pretty close. I mean I know it’s the internet and people hype up their language – I don’t actually want anyone to die in a fire or wish for anyone’s children to get cancer – despite having been a big talker on the intarwebs. But anyone with a 9th grade or above reading and comprehension level can figure out a lot of the attitude of a writer form what they’ve written in a blog, or when giving advice. PUA reports and advice columns are probably the easiest formats to infer the details of the author’s attitudes from.
Also, if you describe anything about your sexual behaviour as ‘tactical’ and don’t see at least some kind of predatory correlation – you’re on crack. And while I don’t have any issues with being a little tactical while you try and convince a girl to like you – I do think it’s icky to take it to the level that PUA’s do.
In terms of how in the dark a woman is, I’ll leave answering that to women. But the ethics of the activity I think exist independent of that fact. Regardless of how adept the person you’re interacting with is at seeing through your BS – selling BS doesn’t become any more enlightened or dignified.
I think it’s a huge mistake to think that advice on general social appropriateness belongs in a conversation about pursuing sexual relationships. It’s a bit like advice on flight dynamics at mach 3 and above in a conversation about jogging. And a good therapist should be vastly more beneficial to general social appropriateness then the intarwebs in general, and much more beneficial than a community devoted exclusively to chasing pussy. If you’re not seeing that reflected in your therapy – I’d say that you are either workings with an inappropriate professional, or your therapist is worthless.
And it’s not creepy because it’s technical. It’s creepy because of the motivations and tones of the material. It’s not advice about self improvement – it’s advice about programming your behaviour to engineer a result – which isn’t a bad thing if you’re teaching people to be more productive at work – but it’s creepy as hell if you’re trying to help people connect sexually. When you reduce sexuality down to something that would fail a reasonably intelligent turing test – I don’t understand how you can even begin to contest it’s creepiness.
I’ve interacted with Tyler on other forums, and honestly my opinion of the guy wasn’t fantastic – but I’m trying to keep my opinion restricted to what’s being written. I agree that what he’s describing (treating a social conversation with a normal human being like an internet forum debate) is bad. But learning how to hide the fact that you’re an intolerable troglodyte isn’t a good way to go about conquering your social problems. Perhaps instead, learn to not be so intolerable and unlikable. Pretending that you’re something your not is a contemptible way to get laid, regardless of the specifics of the lie. It doesn’t matter if you’re pretending to be Obama’s chief advisors on sex, a wealthy doctor, or a socially functional and well adapted human being. Tell the truth, and if you have to – improve yourself so that you’re actually an attractive mate – or you know, be satisfied with having to hide your personal truth so that someone can actually be with you without being repulsed. That sounds like a reasonable way to live.
Also – ranting doesn’t bother me any – my post was pretty ranty (although I did try to tone it down a bit to make the point instead of losing it in emotive/intense language – it still came out a pretty confrontational). I’m not overly invested in winning arguments on the internet – I’m mostly just interested in having the conversation – and if someone reading this gets some benefit from reading the conversation (either from my point of view, or someone elses) then that’s a win I think.
That sounds a lot like the current that says “If you aren’t naturally good at something and try to improve through training, you’re not being yourself and thus deceiving people.”
I don’t think that’s accurate.
If I can’t have Normal (to other people) conversations, because I talk about videogames to mildly or uninterested people a lot or just talk too much about given topics (and can’t read visual cues telling me they’re bored), it’s a good thing to improve my style of communication so I don’t actually make people bored.
I’m not deceiving people about my past social deficiencies, I’m just improving.
Though to me the dating context doesn’t even enter the picture for the most, being a (trans) girl, I don’t have to approach, so I save myself the hassle.
“Also, if you describe anything about your sexual behaviour as ‘tactical’ and don’t see at least some kind of predatory correlation – you’re on crack. ”
Scootah, what I cannot understand is why this kind of thing is not criticized in women – their entire beauty routine and tacticds in handling men in dating are basically no more than this – but when men mimic these same behaviors in the form of Game, it’s suddenly creepy. Is it just that this kind of behavior in women is the baseline and everyone is too used to it to notice it?
Jim:
It’s because they are women that they are allowed to get away with doing alot of the same things the men are doing (Alot of PUA isn’t based on observed tactics from successful males but is based on oberved behaviors in women) and not get called on it.
It’s sexism in a rather rank form -women are the gatekeepers in this model and in order to do so they need all the manipulative -even abusive behaviors in a few instances – they can get while those evil men foik should remain clueless.
There’s probably anywhere from several hundred to several thousand threads on the internet this very minute about how creepy and evil and manipulative the PUA’s are, and nary a one on how manipulative many women’s “dating tactics” are on their own. I also bet that there are currently thousands or tens of thousands of conversations going on about guy’s creepy behavior, these guys NOT being the PUA’s. What’s really whack is that alot of the PUA’s weren’t successful with women because they gave off creepy vibes, often without knowing it. So they got in the seduction community, learned what they were doing wrong and how to correct it, started getting successful with women – and now they are back to being creeps again.
I guess the argument is you can’t take the creep out of a man, even when the only reason he was considered a creep before was that he was violating some unwriten social codes unwittingly or maybe just projected himself wrong.
Another two common tactics used against the seduction community are either to claim it doesn’t work, or claim it makes PUA’s unstoppable automatons, sort of like terminators I guess. In reality, even the best natural “alpha” male in the world, (for the sake of argumet) supplemented by the best game advice given by PUA Masters such as Mystery isn’t going to take every woman he sets his sights on home for a night of wild anonymous sexual passion. I dare say he’d get the vast majority..maybe as much as 80 percent of every woman he propositions in one way or another. But remember, this is hypothetical Uber Alpha male. Naturally smart. Naturally gregorius and socially skilled all by his lonesome. Used to success with women. Successful in life, and a very good hunky (but JUST thin enough for the women that aren’t into uber bulging muscles) body to boot. And on top of that, I’ve given him curiosity about game (these types of lucky guys don’t need to study it, it comes naturally) and a goal to improve and become the Most Wanted Man in the world when it comes to women. In short, I’ve created a perfect pickup machine.
None of the PUA’s, none of the “naturals” are perfect pick up machines. And thus none of the PUA’s written about or talked about -Mystery, Durden, Gravity, Deangelo – none of them has consistently had sex with 80 percent of their targets over any period of time. Even number closes don’t often get that high if you are talking to more than one or two carefully chosen women in a night.
What SC techniques will do is make the average man better. It makes no one an unstoppable woman seducing machine, and thus the moral case that women have no defense against most of it goes away. I mean, look at most of the big PUA’s. They are relatively successful in getting women in bed, and most of the women in their beds are “7″s or above. If you are a guy and want nothing but empty sex, you probably envy them. But getting a girlfriend for most of them who claim to want such a thing is more hit or miss. And so far, none of them has proven successful in having a long term relationship, though Mystery is currently with the mother of his daughter.
And, conversely, if it doesn’t work, then stomping repeatedly on a bunch of deluded losers doesn’t seem like a worthy argument to me.
That’s INCEST!!! Someone call social services!!!
Ok, but why shouldn’t it be posted on this site? I’m checking out your site, but that’s not a valid reason to self-segregate.
My therapist essentially told me to go find PUA literature on the internet.
Scootah,
“Perhaps instead, learn to not be so intolerable and unlikable. ”
That’s a pretty extreme mischaracterization of what these guys describe is going on. Guys do not get rejected for being “intolerable and unlikable” , they get rejected because they fall below a certain standard. It’s equivalent to men mocking a fat women out in public. It’s a form of bullying, really, some of the behavior these guys describe. Norah Vincent explored this pretty extensively. Do you feel like sharing some of your experiences with approaching women maybe, as a model of what works?
“Tell the truth, and if you have to – improve yourself so that you’re actually an attractive mate – or you know, be satisfied with having to hide your personal truth so that someone can actually be with you without being repulsed. That sounds like a reasonable way to live.”
It doesn’t sound very reasonable at all to me. In fact I can’t think of anyone, woman in this case, who would be worth the effort. A woman who doesn’t like the man as he is is really not very worthwhile as she is, at least for him.
Do you remember Lynn Anderson’s “I Beg Your Pardon, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”?
The money verse:
“…I could sing you a tune or promise you the moon,
But if that’s what it takes to hold you,
I’d just as soon let you go, but there’s one thing I want you to know…”
http://www.cowboylyrics.com/ly.....n-279.html
Girls do bad stuff too, why aren’t you talking about that!
1. It’s not the topic at hand. I agree that Women do bad things and some common aspects of women’s behavior is reprehensible. But is that really relevant?
2. If you’re a guy, and you’re hung up on the fact that girls are doing bad stuff and you’re using that as a justification for your own abdication of ethics – maybe you need to take a look at that. Fundamentally – the only person who I can force to do anything is myself. I’m often frustrated by other people not behaving the way I’d like them too – but I don’t see that (and I don’t understand anyone else seeing that) as a reason to stop trying to be a good person myself.
I also don’t see anything to get the girl as a desirable way to go about it. I’m really not sure I see all that much difference between using negs and hypnotism (both of which I’ve seen seriously advocated by PUA’s) – and Roofies (which admittedly, I haven’t seen advocated by PUA’s). Both of them seem like a way to push your will past someone elses ability to make a clear decision. On a side note – I think there’s some pretty significant differences between aesthetic misrepresentation (make up and pushup bras and what have you) and personality misrepresentation. I think as a guy – it’s pretty sound advice to put some effort into looking good, dressing nicely, grooming to present well. I don’t think that’s predatory on nearly the same level as building a learning how to hide all your flaws and present personality attributes you don’t really have. I know that if I get someone home and find out that after the clothes and makeup come off – they aren’t quite as attractive as I first thought – I might be a little dissapointed… But If I found out after that dissapointment that they weren’t the personality that I first connected with – well, that’d freaking suck.
If you could control reality in just the right, very slight way – would you want to get laid because the person you were sleeping with got to know the real you and thought you were funny, charming and interesting – or would you want to get laid because the person you were sleeping with fell for your act? If the first option sounds like the better one – I don’t understand why you’d put time and energy into learning an act, when you could put that same time and energy into self improvement and being funny, charming and interesting instead. I mean why work towards a consolation prize when you could work towards being a winner?
If you’re more into the idea of a sexual partner who’ll go for your act and not care about who you actually are, I have no frame of reference for communicating with you, I freely admit that I don’t understand at all. My only impulse is to pity that kind of disconnection.
That sounds a lot like the current that says “If you aren’t naturally good at something and try to improve through training, you’re not being yourself and thus deceiving people.”
I don’t think it does really, and that’s the opposite of my point. So I’ll try and clarify. I think it’s awesome to genuinely improve yourself. Your entire life is (or at least should be) a process of self improvement, from learning to walk, talk and poop somewhere other than in your pants – to learning to dress nicely and have a friendly conversation to learning how to build a house, format a hard drive or cure cancer. You aren’t decieving people by developing those skills. But when the skills that your developing are skills that hide who you really are and show people a false image – that’s not real self improvement unless your agenda is to be a better liar. You’re not making yourself more desirable – your making yourself better are tricking people into thinking that you’re desirable.
Though to me the dating context doesn’t even enter the picture
See, I think dating context is an important point of differentiation here. I don’t think there’s anything like the same ethical or social context on a casual friendship or a professional acquaintance as there is on the people you establish relationships or sexual dynamics with. I mean I’m a bit deceptive at work – I don’t tell the people I work with that I’m polyamorous or into kink – it’s not relevant and it wouldn’t be professional to bring it up without something making it relevant. But sexuality is so very much more than that. I hope that your sexual partners know how hard you’re working on the social interaction thing and can make their decisions accordingly.
@Recall – I’m not at all associated with Wrong Planet. It’s a well known and popular resource – but apart from three or four posts a few years ago – I have nothing to do with it. I just know it’s got lots of good material there.
In terms of your therapist sending you off to look up PUA material – I’m astonished and I can’t even begin to imagine the context that lead him (or her) to that reccomendation. I can’t imagine how it would work out well for you – but I hope your therapist knows better than me and it turns out to be great advice.
And while I’m not arguing for a seperate but equal neurotypical/austisic conversation barrier or anything – my point was that if you need technical advice on how to have a pleasent conversation, trying to be a PUA is crazy. The last thing you need when you’re trying to learn how to crawl is a running coach. Figure out basic social interaction like having a conversation with a stranger without them thinking you’re a mutant, and then start trying to pick up and hook up with girls.
It doesn’t sound very reasonable at all to me. In fact I can’t think of anyone, woman in this case, who would be worth the effort. A woman who doesn’t like the man as he is is really not very worthwhile as she is, at least for him
Wait, it’s unreasonable to try and be a better person to find a better sexual partner, but it’s reasonable to conceal who you really are and present a false constructed image designed to entice and seduce your sexual partner? How the heck does that make any sense?
Scootah said:
Really? If you think something like that, no wonder we aren’t seeing eye to eye on the ethics. You can’t see any relevant differences between those three things:
- Negs: social influence of a sort that people are used to
- Hypnotism: social influence of a sort that people aren’t used to.
- Roofies: influence via a foreign chemical substance that people don’t consent to.
Negs don’t take away someone’s free will. Roofies do. Big difference. As for hypnotism? I don’t know enough about it; I do know that it’s no longer an important part of most seduction methods nowadays.
Another difference is that negs are merely copying one of the behaviors of socially successful people. We can’t say that it’s OK for people to neg by accident, but not OK if they do it on purpose. I don’t like negs because they don’t fit my personality, and I think they backfire too easily. They indeed induce an emotional reaction in people, but the idea that they take away someone’s free will is crazytalk.
You can’t see any relevant differences between those three things
I’m really not sure I see all that much difference
I think that it’s clear that I see some difference. It’s not your fault someone is naturally highly susceptible and suggestible. It is your fault if they’re only in that state because you slipped them something without their consent. But the ethics of taking advantage of that remain pretty freaking questionable. It’s the difference between bad person and awful criminal – but it’s a pretty bloody narrow difference IMO.
Since presumably you don’t know much about Roofies either – Flunitrazepam (Rohypnol) is a powerful Soporific, or hypnotic. A powerful pschyoactive with certain influences strongly in common with hypnotism. Flunitrzepam is used as a date rape over straight sedatives because it dramatically increases both the susceptibility and suggestibility – or how vulnerable you are to, and how influenced by hypnotic suggestion.
Hypnotising someone who is highly susceptible and highly suggestible into doing something they wouldn’t have otherwise is easy and you can learn to do it in a half day course. Most people are harder to hypnotise and less receptive to suggestion and are much harder to work with. And while you can’t hypnotize someone into doing something that they don’t want to (killing themselves, etc) – influencing someone who’s in a bar looking to hook up towards hooking up with you – isn’t that hard. Influencing someone who’s taken a hypnotic as effective as Flunitrzepam doesn’t take much more than speaking persuasively.
The sedation and memory impairment of Flunitrzepam is more cheaply and easily available on most black markets from other drugs. Opiates, Ketamine, miscellaneous other gear can be easily obtained without your dealer knowing that you’ve got anything in mind except a party. Buying Roofies from most dealers is a pretty risky proposition since most dealers don’t want the kind of attention that comes from date rapes and will often let authorities know to distance themselves from the risk. The only reason to go that route is so that you can take advantage of the hypnotic effects.
What’s the difference between someone who has only average susceptibility and suggestibility, who’s been given a roofie, and someone who’s got high susceptibility and suggestibility who’s had a beer? The roofie is a better way of diminishing their ability to physically resist and dramatically lowers their ability to store short term memories – making it harder to fight a creep off if the suggestion fails, and harder to identify the creep to the cops.
And yeah I know, very few people who function in society are even remotely as susceptible or suggestible as a person on Roofies. But does the magical moral difference start to become clear if you only hypnotize really resistant people? Or if you only use a half or a quarter dose so you don’t lower your target’s resistance so far?
You said: I’m really not sure I see all that much difference
I said: You can’t see any relevant differences between those three things
You said: I think that it’s clear that I see some difference.
I didn’t ask if you didn’t see any difference, I asked if say any relevant difference. We both seem to agree on certain differences, but we seem to disagree on their level of relevance.
To me, the issue of nonconsensual foreign chemical influence is is a pretty glaring difference. If you’d acknowledged this difference in the first place, I wouldn’t have responded with such incredulity. I’m enjoying this discussion, and I’m quite happy to carry it out in a polemical way, or in a more nuanced way. But if you’re going to continue with the polemical route, then I’m hardly going to be grasping the nuances of your views.
To add some nuances to my views, I’ve acknowledged elsewhere that I’m not convinced that hypnosis is entirely ethical (neither am I convinced that all forms of hypnosis in sexual contexts are unethical). One of the arguments I’ve heard for sexual hypnosis is that there isn’t a categorical distinction between certain hypnotic trance states, and the states that people fall into during natural conversation, so bringing about such states intentionally can’t be unethical. I don’t know enough about hypnosis to evaluate that argument.
Your comparison of negs to hypnosis and roofies is still crazytalk. In your view, can any form of intentional influence with a sexual goal be ethical? How about the same influential behaviors done unintentionally?
My view is that if you really think this through, it’s actually really hard to make non-arbitrary ethical restrictions on social influence that don’t outlaw massive amounts of current social behavior that are already widely practiced and considered ethical.
It’s my partner who wants me to improve in social interaction. To listen more, be less insecure and talk less in-depht about stuff. I’m very open and somewhat naive about well, everything, so you can bet my partner knows everything there is to know about sexual-me. We’ve been together 1 year and a half now.
The above is really easy for me. I can talk about the weather or whatever with a stranger without a problem, and they won’t think I’m a mutant. It’s just that I can’t very much pass the cap of acquaintanceship. But I won’t end up with their phone number of invites to their place (as friends) – it hasn’t ever happened. The only one who invited me to his place was….my boyfriend, the day we hit it off (we were somewhat friends for a bout a year before this).
If I had to pick up girls, I’d bat a good 0.000 average. Thankfully, I don’t need to, and prefer online mediums to meet people (where my communication is better, clearer etc), those people usually (80%+) being men. I also get contacted by other trans women.
I’m 28 and have dated…4 people in my life, including my current relationship.
The first one being a total flop, but it was with a girl. I met a guy on a dating site, but after about a week it didn’t work out for me (going too fast). And another invited me to a party at his place, and we did stuff, never properly dated. He seemed to have a thing for trans girls (most of the people at the party were trans women, and he’s pretty much a genderfuck).
Girl at 16, first guy at 24, next guy at 25, current boyfriend at 26 and a half.
and I didn’t intend to be involuntarily celibate, or remain virgin up to 26
Note: I have no idea how I got to go out with that girl at 16. I tried to hit on her, failed…and she picked me anyway, probably out of pity. Then during the relationship she hit on my much more masculine brother, and even his friend.
Oh and note how many more dates I’ve had after transition (at almost 24) versus before. Inexperienced, socially inept girl = better than inexperienced socially inept boy.
“Wait, it’s unreasonable to try and be a better person to find a better sexual partner, but it’s reasonable to conceal who you really are and present a false constructed image designed to entice and seduce your sexual partner? How the heck does that make any sense?”
You’re right, Scootah, it makes no sense. We agree. Infact I think it’s worse than that, I think it’s fraud.
“On a side note – I think there’s some pretty significant differences between aesthetic misrepresentation (make up and pushup bras and what have you) and personality misrepresentation. ”
Interesting point. If a guy puts on his metrosexual guy, man of culture, whatever, that is likely to come across as an aspect of his personality.
Likewise when a woman wears high heels rather than going barefoot with a toe ring, that is going to say something about her self-image, her tastes in not just clothing but a whole range of things – is also a personality statement.
Scootah said:
It doesn’t make sense in the context of a long-term strategy, but it makes sense in the context of “fake it ’til you make it” (aka “learning”, that thing that’s cool in all other domains, but suddenly becomes evil when we do it in the domain of social interaction).
To flesh out my views on self and self-improvement, see some comments from me in a discussion of online dating at LessWrong.
A few quotes:
Scootah:
Where have I indicated that I am incapable of engaging in conversation?
It was useful advice. I found the material interesting, and I’m a mature enough adult that I’m not going to throw away my moral compass by seeing Mystery wearing a funny hat.
In a French TV series called Kaamelott, the 6th season happens in Rome (in around 450-480 AD, it’s not necessarily historically accurate) and has the hero, Arthur, being a roman soldier.
He gets promoted to Centurio from simple soldier, and then to Dux from Centurion and to Dux Bellorum (grand general or something) – simply because a senator in Rome got wind of the Excalibur story and figured only Arthur could use it, and it would end their century-long stalemate against Britain if they placed him on the throne (he’d get recognized as their king without a fight).
But he gets an attitude that says he feels bad about not earning his rank (especially once he’s Dux Bellorum, but it even shows before that). So he eventually has a personal talk with the Emperor. He tells the Emperor that he doesn’t feel he’s a real Dux Bellorum and that he’s just not cut out for the job.
What the Emperor replies is basically a “fake it til you make it”. What he says precisely is “Act like you’re worth the rank, you eventually won’t have to act it, cause you’ll be worth the rank.”
Relationship formation is a numbers game. For both genders. You have to interact with a certain number of people before you find someone you are matched with. Recognizing this fact is not sociopathic.
Why is the word sociopathic coming up, anyway? Sociopaths stereotypically are strategic and pragmatic in social interaction, but they are hardly unique. Salespeople are pragmatic. And plenty of women are strategic (see Cosmo, or The Rules, for example). Even though the strategic approaches employed by men, women, and salespeople can be problematic, it’s just too much of a stretch to call them “sociopathic.”
Dating is about working through as many “targets” as it takes to find someone who buys into your “routine.” This is true of everyone: male, female, gay, or straight. We just don’t normally put it in those terms in polite society.
Yes, direct approaches quickly filter out women who aren’t attracted to you, which does help you get to the next approach. Although this isn’t the primary feature of direct approaches, it is a feature that some PUAs like. That’s not just because PUAs want to bounce to the next woman; it’s also because PUAs are actually human beings with empathy and many of them don’t like imposing their presence on women who aren’t interested at all.
Why you believe that PUAs approach as if they are attracted to everyone, I do not know. PUAs primarily approach women they are attracted to. Of course, there is a limit to how discerning you can be prior to the approach, because you only have superficial cues to go on. To actually be discerning, you need to approach the person and see what they are like.
And direct approaches do involve investing in the approach. That’s a big part of the purpose of direct approaches. Read these descriptions of direct approaches from Pickup 101 here and here. Let’s look at some quotes:
Although PUAs are ready to walk away and find the next woman to approach if a direct approach doesn’t succeed, direct approaches are a way that both people can quickly be invested in a conversation and go immediately to the stage of getting to know each other, rather than requiring 10 minutes of bantering first.
To watch an actual direct approach (though not quite as intense as the example above), see this video. It started out with a hidden camera, but they showed her the camera and later got her consent to use the video.
I can’t reconcile what PUAs write about direct approaches with your caricature.
Scootah said:
Why is it “awful” and why is the reasoning “predatory”? To recap, this is the behavior we are talking about (unless you have something from outside my post in mind):
It’s a little cheesy, sure, but it’s not awful. As for Juggler’s reasoning:
I’m having trouble getting in a moral panic about this reasoning. Where’s the predatory part? Juggler’s “Statement of Interest” allows him to test the mutuality of the interaction. There is nothing predatory about this.
You describe a supposedly “alternative” to how PUAs think about displays of interest:
To me, your “alternative” sounds pretty similar to Juggler’s analysis. What you describe is how PUAs think about statements of interest, when you remove the jargon.
Scootah said:
Thanks for explaining a bit more about where you are coming from. Your perspective makes sense when you are talking about the intersection of pickup and fratire. Yet this intersection is relatively recent. People like Tucker Max don’t have a background in traditional pickup. While he isn’t unknown in the seduction community, and many PUAs would view him as an inspirational “natural,” he isn’t really representative of PUAs.
What are some of the names and schools of thought you are basing your opinions of pickup on?
You were discussing this quote from a PUA:
PUAs are not predators because they are unwilling to stick their heads in the sand about what success with women actually involves. It involves skill, whether natural or learned. While men care relatively more about looks, women care more about behavior. See this study by Berry and Miller (2002):
Additionally, women typically expect men to initiate physically. That takes skill.
Given that the masculine role in dating involves certain skills (so does the feminine role, just different ones), it’s neither surprising nor predatory when men incorporate their level of dating skills into their self-image, like the PUA I quoted. In psychology, a feeling of one’s capabilities is called self-efficacy. There is nothing wrong with either men or women developing self-efficacy about their dating skills.
Simultaneously, I would encourage an improving PUA to not just think of his skills as growing, but to also think of himself as growing.
It’s true that some PUAs may primarily care about women’s feelings for purely pragmatic reasons, but to project such an attitude only PUAs in general is bias and prejudice at its finest. I will also suggest that even if some PUAs only start out considering women’s perspectives for pragmatic reasons, such consideration can grow into real empathy over time. This is one of the ways in which I think the seduction community is liberationary: it has the potential to reach men with negative attitudes towards women who cannot be reached in any other way, and change their attitudes.
Scootah said:
Some aspects of pickup language do betray genuinely problematic attitudes. Yet you are going to have a lot of false positives, because you seem determined to spin attitudes in the seduction community as “predatory” that are actually just realistic, such as thinking of dating as a skill or a numbers game. Here’s another example:
I personally don’t like the word “tactical” to describe my sexual behavior because of the military undertones, but I’m going to have to take up the crack pipe and maintain that a tactical mindset is not inherently predatory. As I’ve previous observed, genuinely predatory people sometimes have tactical mindsets, but so do salespeople, stand-up comedians (just think of their schemes to get you to laugh!), musicians/composers (they plot dastardly chord progressions to play on your emotions and get you to buy their songs on iTunes!), and many mainstream women (e.g. Cosmo, The Rules, and “girl talk” with friends).
The vast majority of pragmatic social behavior is not predatory, and not all predatory people are tactical, so I don’t there is much of a “predatory correlation” to tactical sexual behavior. Of course, tactical behavior with negative intent and lack of empathy could justify a comparison to predation, but merely being tactical isn’t enough.
You can’t make that sort of separation, because whether a certain behavior is “BS” depends on shared norms, or the lack thereof. A lot of pickup behaviors really discover existing norms and scripts of male-female communication. If everyone knows the script, then approaches involving “active disinterest” (for example) aren’t “BS,” because both people know what’s going on (she knows that he really is interested, on some level).
On this point, I’m very close to agreeing with you. People who have true clinical issues are probably not ready for the seduction community; that’s not to say they couldn’t get something out of it, but it could also be harmful. The seduction community isn’t ideal for guys lower than, say, the 5th or 10th percentile of social skills. But for guys in perhaps the 10th-60th percentile of social skills, the seduction community can be great.
There actually are some sources of advice that are better than the raw seduction community for guys around the 10th percentile of attractiveness. I highly recommend Succeed Socially. The guy it’s written by has a background in the seduction community, but his writing strips out the jargon and harmful stuff, and focuses it for people with significant social challenges. He used to have another site called Dating Groundwork, that discussed more dating-specific advice for guys (and also pluses and minuses of the seduction community), but it doesn’t appear to be up anymore.
Scootah said:
Pickup is absolutely about self-improvement. Self-improvement, and programming your behavior to engineer a result, aren’t mutually-exclusive. In fact, they are highly overlapping. Sometimes, the best way to achieve a certain result is to improve yourself. Sometimes, to improve yourself, you need to figure out how to achieve certain results.
Language such as “programming your behaviour to engineer a result” indeed sounds creepy according to current social norms that penalize honest discussion of exactly how social interaction works. Over the long-term, I certainly don’t think that PUAs should think about women and social interaction purely through engineering or scientific metaphors. There is potential alienation and lack of empathy possible from such an attitude.
But such language isn’t evil; it’s just another way of looking at things, and put them in terms that nerdy guys can understand.
Good, we seem to agree on something.
Do you really think PUAs are telling guys who are intolerable and unlikable to stay that way, and merely learn to act like they are not? PUAs are advising these guys to change. Tyler’s post I quoted doesn’t just tell guys to change their behaviors, it tells them to change their attitudes. Furthermore, one of the best ways to change your attitudes is to change your behaviors (see this study, for example).
[...] post is a duplicate of the NoH post above and has the "Regular Parallel" comment thread. Please read this for the commenting ground rules, [...]
I don’t really have anything to contribute, but I love this thread and I hope Scootah doesn’t get overwhelmed and stop writing.
Damn it, I forgot to subscribe to comments again.
I have to comment on this:
In medical terminology, “hypnotic” refers to something that induces sleep. (Hypnos was the Greek god of sleep). It has nothing to do with the body of psychological techniques called “hypnosis”. In all the reports I have seen, rapists use drugs like rohypnol to make their victims unconscious, not to increase their “susceptibility and suggestibility”.
Hypnosis is controversial. Therapists use it successfully to treat patients, but skeptics claim the “hypnotic state” of mind is no different from ordinary concentration. Scientific evidence for the effectiveness of hypnosis is inconclusive. The pop-culture idea that a hypnotist has some kind of irresistible power over the people he hypnotizes is a huge exaggeration.
This is an odd statement. Are you saying that dealers of illegal drugs are calling the police when their customers ask for Roofies?
Hugh:
That’s what it all boils down to, isn’t it? Influence is a form of control, and controlling someone in order to have sex with them is clearly wrong. The words “seduction,” “target,” and other PUA lingo clearly imply this kind of control. Much of the seduction material floating around on the web encourages it.
You’ve compared seduction to “strategic” sales techniques. I would say “strategic” in this context means “controlling.” Control is about trying to change others’ behaviors rather than focusing on what we have to offer. It’s about carrots and sticks at best, and trying to get people to act against their best interests at worst.
There is a double standard, of course. People are willing to admit that there are shades of grey in most other areas, but not this one. When it comes to seduction, most people’s views seem to be black-or-white.
The Seduction Community is a response to this kind of black-or-white attitude. Guys band together to try to shield themselves from the excessive sexual fear and shame that the outside world lobs at men. Once you drown out all the white noise, you’re left with uncensored thoughts from men who are trying to seduce women. The result is predictably chaotic and repulsive to most.
But as you’ve pointed out, Hugh, there is a lot of wisdom mixed in. I’ve encountered more help and wisdom from the Seduction Community than from all the family, friends, and authority figures in my life combined. That’s frustrating to me, because so many of those close to me have insisted that they knew how to solve my problems. Some of the people I’ve loved and trusted the most have even used my problems to control me, by telling me that if I followed their agenda, my problems would be solved. Infuriatingly, the same people who are quick to shame PUAs for the slightest exercise of control are quick to bind any young man who will listen with crippling sexual shame.
It’s taken me a long time to reason all this through. I wish I didn’t have to use reason, but it seems that is the only tool my nature has granted me to work these things through. The conclusion that I have come to is that all of the useful advice in seduction is about overcoming shame and fear. There is nothing controlling about carrying yourself with confidence or sensitizing yourself to the give-and-take of an interaction so you can express interest at times when it will feel right for both of you. Unfortunately, although the vast of the guys who get involved with the Seduction Community understand this, the vocabulary and tone date back to a time when sexually frustrated geeks first started posting rants railing against the system.
This is my favorite explanation of what I am talking about. It’s from Juggler:
http://www.charismaarts.com/building-bridges/
In a word, the valuable stuff in the Seduction Community is about connection, not control.
Sonata9:
You are conflating influencing, persuading with controlling. If I give you advice that you think “advances my agenda”, and you fail to follow my advice, and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Except for aspects of NLP, (and this partly depends on whether you think hypnosis works or not, but at least the people using it are HOPING it works, and so have an explicit desire to get past conscious decision making, not all PUA’s use NLP) and some horrible advice in the community to get by last minute resistance, I don’t really see any techniques that remotely infringe on free-will unless you want to do like a certain poster did here a year or so ago and conflate even such minor deceptions as “faking” confidence with rape.
Clarence said:
This is exactly my perspective also. NLP and hypnosis? Potential problems with free will and informed consent. “Last minute resistance” (LMR) tactics? A few of them could be pressuring, and others have a milder problem of creating sex that is consensual, but that is not enthusiastically consented to, and that may be regretted later.
As for the rest of the pickup corpus, I have trouble seeing any infringement on the woman’s free will, at least, no more that typical human social interaction. There are still problems with plenty of PUA techniques and attitudes, but the problems are something other than inhibit of free will (e.g. techniques that are more annoying to women than conducive to actual dating).
The majority of non-NLP/hypnosis pickup is cribbed from existing attractive socially-skilled guys (aka the “naturals”) operating within common social norms. Lots of smart people on the internet who like to discuss gender (feminist or otherwise) aren’t part of these scenes and don’t know how they work. When they hear PUAs describe in frank language the behaviors that are rewarded in these scenes, they get into a moral panic. Intelligent, nerdy people generally aren’t engaging in much status-related behavior in social interaction or trying to make themselves look good, and they don’t understand that everyone else is.
As a result, PUAs take the blame for teaching men to integrate into present-day social and gender dynamics. Of course, feminists often want to change those gender dynamics, and rightfully so in many cases. But the way to do so is not require the most scrupulous and female-sympathetic 10% of men to martyr their romantic lives. The problem here isn’t just those men not “getting laid,” but also that women are deprived of them as mates (limiting them to most gender-typical and less-scrupulous guys). Furthermore, when those men are locked out of dating within the gender system, they have no power to change the gender system, even though they are some of the most motivated people to change it.
Clarence:
This has nothing to do with what I wrote. You’ve even inserted something in quotes that I didn’t write. Let me just say that I wasn’t attempting to allocate blame.
I’m not. Influence and persuasion are types of control.
I agree with you in the sense that the vast majority of the guys in the Seduction Community correctly intuit the difference between control and connection. But there was a time when Ross Jeffries’ NLP stuff and its derivatives were the main things out there. The vocabulary and tone draws from those ideas, even if the strategy has moved on. Don’t forget that. You and I don’t focus on that because that’s not what we’re drawn to, but people who are not looking for help will likely notice the evil stuff first. (Never mind whether or not the NLP stuff actually works. That’s not important.)
And beyond that, there are shades of grey. I dislike spam messages and other forms of intrusive advertising. I consider them forms of control, though they are not as egregious as other forms, like physical coercion or threats.
Let me try to explain in a way that won’t sound like an attack. Here is the difference between control and connection, as I see it:
connection
—————
sharing
communication
discussion
cooperation
love and compassion
control
—————
giving and taking
commerce
persuasion
power and influence
fear and desire
Everyone engages in some forms of control. No one is perfect this regard. The problem with many forms of morality is that they try to make perfection attainable. If perfection is attainable, you can just get to a certain point and stop trying. What I’m suggesting is that people can always find ways to improve.
Also, understanding the difference between right and wrong doesn’t seem very simple to me. Sometimes it’s a difference of perspective and intention. I like a lot of Juggler’s writings. But he’s said that having a good conversation should be like smoking crack. In other words, as I understand it, the goal is to addict someone to your approval.
Contrast that with his bridges video. I’m sure you can see that one perspective is darker than the other, even though they are really two perspectives on the same idea.
In reality, you don’t need to addict anyone. It’s difficult to stop worrying about others’ approval, but once you do, others will be naturally drawn to you. If you are being yourself uninhibitedly, you are likely to be consistent and predictable in dolling out your approval. People who want it will learn how to get it and share their approval with you as well. It’s a Zen thing.
Sonata9, your framework of “connection vs control” is interesting, but I’m a bit skeptical of your conceptualization.
How come? How are you defining “control”? This seems like an argument by definition.
When I think about control, I think about limiting or removing people’s ability to make choices. When I think about influence and persuasion, I think about ways to raise the chance that someone will make a choice that you will want, without inhibiting their ability to choose (or at least, without necessarily inhibiting choice).
For example, you might hear a sample of a song on iTunes. Hearing this sample influences you, yes: it plays on your emotions. But you have a choice to buy it. Even if the song gets stuck in your head, it’s not “controlling” your mind. The song may make you want to buy it, and you might in fact buy it. But you bought it out of complete free will; you had complete choice.
I consider this example to show how you can have forms of influence that don’t control people, so I can’t accept the equation of influence and control. I think you have it backwards. Influence isn’t a form of control: control is a form of influence.
Ah, but “carrying yourself with confidence or sensitizing yourself to the give-and-take of an interaction” does influence people, and you know that it does. So isn’t this control over others? I think that’s where the notion of influence as control starts to break down. According to that conceptualization, charismatic people are just walking through the world “controlling” everyone due to their influential personality traits; I find that description non-intuitive.
Similarly, many of your examples of connection actually come from influence, or result in influence. For example, if a woman who is attracted to you also connects with you, it will influence her in the direction of wanting to be sexual with you.
In social interaction, humans cannot step outside influence any more than fish can step outside of water. I don’t think we should say that all forms of influence are “control,” and people are merely imperfect. Instead, we should draw distinctions between different types of influence, and the choice and autonomy that they allow. I argue that if we draw these distinctions, it makes sense to associate some forms of influence with control, but not others.
Here’s where I agree with you. Yes, PUA language often uses metaphors of control (sometimes even PUAs with positive, women-friendly methods like Juggler). This is problematic, and we can really do without it.
Despite the control-centric language sometimes employed by PUAs, I think that if you look at most of their methods (with exceptions that Clarence and I have mentioned), there is very little that can reasonably be called control. Furthermore, a lot of control-centric language is in pickup marketing materials that are full of hype. Just because my ebook (available for $99.99) promises you uncanny mind-control over women, it doesn’t make that actually the case.
When I learned to flirt with women, it suddenly did feel that I had magic powers of mind control. But did I really? No. The feeling of power I got from having very average flirting ability was merely a testament to how powerless and invisible I had felt before.
I completely agree with you that describing pickup in terms of connection can be much better than describing it in terms of control. We could take Juggler’s excellent post you link to, and translate into language of control. This suggests that there are many ways to describe the same thing.
Your comments actually have two different theses. Your first thesis is that influence is a form of control, which humans avoid imperfectly. Your second thesis is that some PUA materials use the language of control, and a language of connection is preferable. I would suggest that these claims are distinct, and the second makes sense while the first does not.
Getting stuck in a “I want to appear good” is also a problem. Aspies generally don’t see the point, so they don’t – they’re also generally feeling free from many gender role constraints (I don’t feel I HAVE to wash my hair daily, or HAVE to always have styled hair or made-up face in public) that some people they can’t get out of without dire consequences (when it’s rarely true, people aren’t citing the obligation of men to not wear dresses, but more stuff like having to wear ties).
Yes, it looks like your conception of control is a little closer to Webster’s definition:
a. to exercise restraining or directing influence over.
That’s a good working definition.
Yes, a better way of saying it is that connection and control are two different types of influence. That goes along with what you’re saying. And we agree that there is nothing wrong with improving confidence or connecting better with others. They are not directing or restraining forms of influence.
There is a little more grey than you and Clarence have mentioned. Perspective matters. An uninhibited guy will let those around him know when he’s happy or unhappy with their behavior. He doesn’t do this to “push” or “pull” them toward any particular goal, and he isn’t trying to addict them to his personality. I would argue that someone consciously emulating the confident guy’s behavior in order to influence others is attempting to control them: he’s exercising a directing influence.
So basic ideas like “push-pull” are a little controlling, in my view.
Conventional wisdom seems to hold that intention matters. Directing influence is usually considered immoral, while other forms are not. That’s wise, because directing influence is likely to lead to outcomes that are worse for all parties. As you’ve said above, though, it’s tough not to be focused on outcome. The social reaction to outcome-focused guys is disproportionate.
hahaha yeah.
Yes. And I think that explains the disproportionate reaction that many have to it. People think PUA stuff is more potent than it actually is.
Yes!
No! Once you change the description, you change the thing.
Let me modify the first thesis, then. All directed (that is, outcome-focused) influence is controlling, and humans (including me) only avoid this imperfectly.
so just as a for reference thing, I’m not forgetting/ignoring/abandoning this conversation – but my day job is giving me extreme headaches right now – so my time and ability to refrain from shouting are a bit tied up for the next day or two. Which is lame I know.
No worries, Scootah. We’ll still be around in a couple days.
I’m not particularly familiar with PUA but I disagree with the point made here. I’ve never been particularly strong socially and I regard social interaction (and romantic/sexual interaction) to be much of an art. There will be those who naturally excel at it, and those who will have to spend much time training themselves to gain even an average skill level.
If you look at musical training, the first lessons will be very elemental focusing on individual discrete actions. Later those individual elements will be combined, and eventually those combinations combined to produce a performance. However, even at that level the performance will still be very mechanical and devoid of emotion. That’s because its necessary to learn how ones actions influence outcomes as well as experience those outcomes before an understanding of the art can be obtained. It’s only once that understanding is achieved that personality and emotion can be expressed.
Social (and romantic) interaction is similar. Some people aren’t naturally good at it. Some people need to go through the robotic, engineered actions, observing and experiencing the outcome to gain an understanding of the process. It’s only after gaining that understanding can they actually express their personality and emotions and genuinely connect with another person.
I’m not sure I would consider “strategic” sales techniques as inherently unethical. Certainly there are many sales methods that employ unethical behaviour, attempting to manipulate people into buying something that is not in their best interests. However there are aspects of sales techniques that are about facilitating a knowledgeable and free decision in the best interests of the buyer.
One of the key aspects is the opportunity cost of gaining information to make a decision. If you start an ad with the negative aspects of the product then chances are a potential buyer will skip over the rest of the (otherwise positive) ad, even though on balance your product is the better choice for them. Information may need to be inferred rather than stated directly to better communicate it (e.g you may need to demonstrate your magic frying pan cooking food, not simply state that it does). In addition you may need to provide auxiliary material, such as humour, to facilitate the knowledge transfer even though its not related or true to the nature of the product.
Similar concepts apply to social endeavors. If you start by drawing attention to your negative attributes, someone may not take time to get to know your positive ones. It’s not enough to claim to be a nice person, you have to do nice things. Getting to know someone isn’t about learning facts about them, it’s about sharing experiences; comfortably sharing experiences with a stranger isn’t something that is a part of everyones personality but is a necessary part of getting to know someone.
To the extent the seduction community is about teaching skills to deal with the initial approach and dating scene, I see it as facilitating and framing the information transfer to achieve a more complete romantic assessment.
I think a lot of the objection Scootah is having is directed to the other half of the Seduction Community.
The community can be looked as if being composed of two groups: Those who get it and those who don’t. The objection of Scootah is towards the ‘don’t get it’-group which is also the part that gets picked up on first when anyone is studying what is going on there; It is the part where it all begun. What I think Scootah is missing is that eventually the people change. The internal resistance to simply remaining and being just themselves has gone but the amount and level of detail in the work required can be staggering.
The problem is not in that the people who eventually get it wouldn’t be able to understand Scootah’s own ‘more direct’ advice how to do it right. The problem is that the ‘more direct’ advice is not advice at all as the people who are receiving the advice have no connection to the meaning of the words Scootah would be trying to impress them with. It’s like a teacher yelling A B C’s to the dumb hicks in a remote village, and they just can’t figure how it connects to them sweating the lodge out of the forest.
There is a lot of bad toning and undercurrent in lot of the material but one has to consider where it comes from and who created it. Is it not more valuable to have material that connects emotionally to the people who are trying to adopt it, if in the end the final lesson and the final test is in the humanity of the person who finally gets it and is able to let that part go? But without that original tone of emotion they would not have been able to connect with the material at all. What good would that kind of material do to anyone?
Great post again. Regardless of the differences in the seduction community, though, I would advise against ANY man interested in marriage adopting the term “pickup artist”. Or a member of the “seduction community”. I’m a Christian, and for us the limits come it preeeetty close, clear and soon.
Welcome to the blog, Jennifer.
I think the whole discussion about PUA is completely off perspective among feminists. Perhaps this where the “wishful thinking at the cost of the truth” rampant in feminism reveals itself most of all.
What people forget about PUA is that it is not a construct or an idea but simply a set of solutions to certain problems that a great many men have. Obviously those solutions are relatively successful which is reflected in the size and growth of the industry.
So if you don’t like those techniques then your only hope is to offer better techniques – and by better I don’t mean ethically more proper but simply more effective in solving the problems. The only other hope of changing PUA is to address the problems themselves that PUA solves. But this can only be done by a large majority of women who collectively decide to change their dating behaviour.
The other thing that might be worth considering is that PUA is actually created by women. More precisely, by the average woman’s dating behaviour. PUA is the result of that behaviour and nothing else. My impression from feminists is that PUA is really a critical study on female mating behaviour without the blindfolds and sugar coating of ideologically driven activists and thus it reveals some less than perfect characteristics in the average woman. This is probably the main drive behind these discussions and that’s why they are so silly.
The bottom line is:
You want to change PUA? Then you have to change female mating behaviour.
Damn Adi, that’s brilliant.