Are you disputing that an average-ish younger woman will have an easier time attracting guys than an average-ish older woman?
Seriously, I’m not tooting my own horn. I’m not precisely a conventionally attractive girl (and yeah, I know what they say on the snark boards…and I have a mirror) but some guys like what I have and I do try to maintain myself. I’ve never been a beauty queen, or even girl-next-door cute, though.
I guess if we’re talking about nightclubs where you don’t know anyone but the people you walked in with, and are planning on striking up conversations with complete strangers, then the dating world does sound bleak.
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I spent my single years here in Indianapolis. For the most part, the guys I dated we’re at least on the periphery of my social circle. I can’t even imagine a scenario in which a pickup artist type of dude would be appealing to me. But then, I’ve never been into “players.”
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Basically, I think your chance of success with dating or hooking up can be exponentially increased if you are working within a good social circle. We have a big one because we got to know everyone through the local music scene. That fact expanded the dating possibilities greatly. We even have a local music messageboard that doubled as a dating site (not really, but it might as well have). I bet at least 30 couples came directly out of that large group. The hookups probably range in the hundreds.
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Hell, I should write my own book on how to get laid. There’s obviously a market for it.
I think it’s important to remember that “pick up artistry” isn’t a coherent philosophy; it’s a complex of a variety of attitudes, tricks, and idioms that is sold as a product that has made a couple people pretty rich.
It’s pretty fair to say that people who do read up on and follow the tenets of PUA substantially improve their dating outcomes. Not merely in having sex, but in establishing relationships. Dispute it if you will, but among my pretty socially awkward group of male straight friends, once influenced by it many who had never even kissed a woman ended up with a very active romantic life.
The issue is establishing causation, though. The narrative that PUA in its purest form offers–women are skanks who’ll put out if you can trick her evolved biology into thinking you’re higher status than her, and by buying our books you can learn how!–is very implausible. No woman thought these guys were “alphas” or whatever the terminology is.
But since PUA is really just a random grab bag of ideas and scripted actions, some of them are bound to be helpful. Prime of which is that quantity has a quality all its own. Many of the aforementioned guys had never even approached a woman before really (except the entire fall for a girl, become good friends with her, reveal feelings to her routine)*.
I might argue even the veiled (and not-so-veiled) misogyny is part of what makes PUA successful. Many of these guys react to virtually everyone they’re interested in as unapproachable. By appealing to latent negative attitudes toward women, PUA flips an override switch that mentally allows the guy to interact with someone in a substantially more attractive way than doting or worship. Treating women simply as people not being an option, of course.
Various other PUA goodies vary from ineffective but morally blameless (“peacocking”) to effective but highly wrong (the infamous neg).
A lot of this can be summed up as: “Dumbo’s Feather”.
The problem with this particular “Dumbo’s Feather” is that it comes packed with a load of nasty stereotypes.
It is as if Timothy told Dumbo he could fly, but only if he pissed on people first. 
Can you explain why you think this? Because to me, there really isn’t all that much difference between being friends with someone and being someone’s partner (except for the sex). So it seems to me that a decent way to start a romantic relationship is to first become friends with the person, to see how you both interact together. I do know that many of my female friends I wouldn’t mind having sex with. But the standard thinking seems to be that friendship and partnership are two completely different things. Men are warned not to fall in the “friend zone” of women they are interested in, because then they’ll never have sex with them. And often ex-couples don’t keep seeing each other as friends, as if once a romantic relationship ends, there really isn’t any “friendship” there worth maintaining. Reading this thread (and especially the women’s comments) suggests that indeed, for many people, a romantic relationship and a friendship are two completely different things. And here you say that by striking up a friendship with a woman he’s actually attracted to, a shy guy is actually being dishonest with her. So I’d like to know more about that line of thinking.
Holy shit! Where have you been?
I love this.
PUA methods work because they boil down to encouraging socially awkward men to interact with women, and that is really basically all it takes.
OT, but: Well, it’s about being honest about what you’re looking for. If a guy portrays himself to a woman he’s definitely interested in as someone just looking for friendship, his hidden motives are certainly relevant to her, because people have the right to avoid emotional complications they don’t want. (I see this as different from the situation where two people are still feeling each other out, btw, since the guy presumably doesn’t know himself what his intent is, and it’s implicit the first few of times you meet that things have the potential to turn romantic, platonic, or just die off entirely.)
I agree with you about friends and romantic partners not being distinct and exclusive categories. This, however, is about honesty and communicating intent, which is important for both types of relationships.
Oh, no, not at all - just that many women, even attractive ones, can’t get a guy by just standing there looking hot.
I agree with this totally, but I think most of these guys already believe most of those nasty stereotypes, so I don’t think anyone really ends up worse off than before. Maybe a little, but then you have guys who get out there and talk to women, and have success and leave the misogyny behind, so, on balance… yeah, I’d say it’s a wash.
I agree. I want to see the proof that this Roissy guy is really so successful with women.
I also agree that there is nothing particularly new or original about this “pick up artist” crap. Ovid wrote a guide on how to pick up women for sex 2000 years ago.
Many of you guys say bad things about the community. Well, it’s true that the community uses to much tricks and tactics. It focuses too much on pickup lines and such…
But hey…it works too! If I didn’t stumble upon all these stupid lines, I would still be shy and in misery…I mean, I started with lines like these http://pickuplinesblog.com/ … in the beginning, it wasn’t easy. I had to practice a lot and later I found out that I don’t even need any lines.
But the community got me to take the first step. And that is the most important thing to remember. Without taking the first step (even if it was a stupid and wrong step) I would not be here and happy.
Dude, there’s nothing to justify about the PUA community.
Women treat social ineptness in men like it is the mark of the satanic beast. I consider it karmic payback that they get taken by PUA’s who are good at what they do.
You have to make the first move. You have to be the alpha male. You have to do all the effort to break the ice. So you know what… PUA away. Be good at it, though. Do it with no apologies.
If anyone was wondering about where the misogyny is in the PUA community, look no further. This is something I’ve heard expressed relatively often…a sort of sour grapes “girls rejected me in the past, so I am going to use psychological manipulation to hurt women,” attitude. There are times where it crosses the line between “we all do that mating dance and have sex and it’s fun” and into being vindictive and seeking to purposefully harm people.
Note the attitude is towards all women. Individuals do not figure in to it at all. Yes, it is misogyny not to think of women as individual people.
But how do you portray yourself as being just looking for a friendship? Absent her asking directly, I mean. I ask because my problem isn’t that I’m “socially inept” or don’t dare talk with women. I do that fine. My problem is that I don’t know how to show romantic interest in them, at least in a timely manner and in a way that’s both subtle and yet obvious enough to allow them the option to accept or turn me down gently, so most of the time I just don’t do it. Am I lying to them? I thought women were quite aware of the fact that if they have male friends, chances are good these friends would want to have sex with them if the situation arose.
Again, my answer to this is, how do you communicate intent?
Hurt and revenge have nothing to do with it.
Success with women is the sole purpose of the PUA community.
Karmic payback exists here in that these same dudes that get called “socially inept” have managed to show you that they’re anything but. You’re not so much better than they are, after all, if they can win you over with PUA. They’re not there to pump and dump. :rolleyes: Karmic payback is you realizing you’re not as superior as you think you are. That apparently is hurtful enough.
Show me an individual woman who has empathy for guys who have had it bad in the dating arena. What would you care about a man if he was socially inept and didn’t use PUA techniques to make his life better? You wouldn’t. Name me a woman who would so much as piss on him if he were on fire.
Me, I didn’t wait for women to have empathy. I got wise to the game as a teenager and adapted. The PUA scene helps you adapt. It is not about vindictiveness. The PUA would have saved me a lot of trial and error.
My wife. It’s one of many reasons I married her.
Of course it’s about revenge if you are using terms like “karmic payback”. Payback for what? It’s not a woman’s fault for not being interested in you if you come across as weird, creepy or boring.
Example of a comment that indicates low male status.
(bolding mine)
That’s a big “if”, right? I’m not inclined to believe that a reasonably intelligent woman with a discerning eye and self-esteem would fall for the wannabe PUA. But you are more than welcome to bed those who do.
I think that if PUA techniques work, they only work on a small subset of the female population (and this population probably would go home with any willing guy, PUA or not). A relevant consideration here is the quality of this population. Do PUA-subscribers even care that the kind of women that are charmed by neg hits and other displays of dominance very often have a lot of baggage and psychological issues? No, of course they don’t care. They just want a woman, any woman, and it doesn’t matter if she’s a crazy person. (All women are crazy people, in their mind.) One woman is interchangable with any other one; their personalities are minor details when it comes to her desirability to the PUA. The whole philosophy that female behavior can be predicted and controlled by the PUA algorithm in and of itself speaks to this lumping of women into one amorphous, object-like, blog.
The thing that makes me judge someone as a loser wrt dating is not their inability to take home any willing piece of ass. It’s their desperation as revealed by a total lack of standards and self-integrity. To me, a guy who is a little unattainable is more attractive than someone who is flirting with every single woman in the house, all other things being equal.