Is the "pick up artist" movement an inherently good or bad thing?

[TheWhoToTheWhatNow]

@you_with_the_face

Makeup on women is not comparable to adopting a whole set of behaviors to mimic a personality that you don’t naturally have.

Sure it is. Men are attracted to women’s looks, women are attracted to a man’s status. That’s why the chick with the nice tits has tons of guys doing double-takes as she walks through a room or chases after her for years even if she has no job, can’t pay her rent, has self-esteem issues, uses men, can’t string together an intelligent sentence to save her life, etc.

And a man who’s not physically attractive who walks into a room with two supermodels on his arm and the manager of the restaraunt comes over to greet him personally etc. has women doing double-takes. It’s his status that’s attractive.

There are variations in this based on personality types and all, but the dude-porn industry of backstory-less girls getting jizzed on their dolled up selves and the chick-porn industry of white knights choosing the one special woman above all other women around him tend to back up that it’s a fair generalization for a discussion like this.

A fun experiment is to arrive at a bar before all your friends get there, purposely get shot down by the bitchy-personality super dolled up bar-star type girls that like snubbing guys. Then watch what happens when all your friends show up and your buddies are shouting happy to see you and girls in your group are grabbing you to have a shot with them, and girls from before that thought you were just another lame low-status guy realize you’re actually someone “important”. Suddenly those girls are all smiles and giggles and try to chat you up again. This is a repeatable experiment and hilarious to see in action.

Guys don’t care if a girl knows everyone in the room, or if she’s a rocket scientist or what-have-you. That’s part of why cities with a lot of business oriented types have a ton of older women still hitting the bars…because they focused on their careers but then found out that at the end of the day most guys don’t care about that stuff in terms of attraction and will still chase the low-quality girl with the nice boobs, so now they end up playing catch-up. It’s a little depressing to see, but very common in big corporate cities.

@you_with_the_face

but at the same time, you wouldn’t expect her to go online and brag about this buffoonery

That’s because no one says doing that won’t work. We all know it works. But people will say pick-up doesn’t work, this thread has plenty of examples of that. I don’t see how you consider the two an equal comparison when one is accepted by society and the other isn’t yet.

@you_with_the_face

I get the sense that you want us to be impressed by the whole world that PUA has opened up to you.

I already know people dislike the concepts of PUA, haha I’m not going to impress anyone. I’m just here to answer questions with more depth than the average “I read The Game once and everyone in it was a horrible person and PUA is evil!!!11” person that tends to contribute to these threads. If there were another PUA with my level of experience/study participating in these threads, I would still be lurking. Just fighting ignorance is all…if someone can come around to the idea that “okay maybe PUA isn’t as horrible and evil as I thought it was before I read this thread”, I consider that enough of a win.

@you_with_the_face

Poor Plain Jane. Can’t catch a break. Guess she should get breast implants and start being giggly.

She doesn’t have to. But if she felt like it was important to her to do to help her self-esteem, I wouldn’t judge her for it.

@Beware_of_Doug

It strikes me that if there were some alternative to pickup for people like your 29yo friend, it would make finding his own confidence and assertiveness a somewhat more straightforward process. As it is, an awful lot of what he has to overcome seems to be part of a long-term, closely-held worldview.

Absolutely. A lot of confident people are confident because they did things like backpacking through Europe (you learn self-reliance, you have to learn to make decisions, etc.), or worked in a social job like bartending (you learn not to put up with silly behavior, you learn to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves, you learn to empathize with people who complain about their lives to you, you learn to start conversations to make tips, etc.). There are a lot of ways to gain confidence and become one of those people who “just has swagger”.

The problem is a lot of guys didn’t put themselves in those situations as they grew up, so they missed out. Throw in a fatherless home since single motherhood is so high these days, where they didn’t have any real upstanding male role model to follow. Now ditch all the “manly” Marlon Brando, Rambo, Schwartzenegger role models and replace them with effeminate Keanu Reeves, Edward Norton (though he can play a badass), Michael Cera role models in media. Then throw in all the wonderfully-intentioned but inaccurate motherly/sisterly advice on women, etc. and you end up with a super nice guy who’s a perfect gentleman but can’t figure out why doing everything society told him to do didn’t result in the wife and white-pickett fence he was told it would.

Someday if I have a son, I hope to not HAVE To teach him pick-up. I hope to instead, by improving myself now, simply BE a positive confident male role model for him so that he has an example to learn from so that he can live a normal life like everyone else. But if I had a son and the guy I was 10+ years ago was his role model? He would probably end up just like my buddy who’s trying to unwire himself.

@Beware_of_Doug

AFAICT, pickup says the problem is how you’re coming off, but explains it in terms of how you know yourself. Changing that, or even just “acting out” the change, is a long, serious slog of lifework. Plus, he’ll have to carry the extra weight of pretending to be confident and self-possessed all along the way.

Yes, it’s a rough journey. That’s why most guys just dabble in it and then give up, especially if they haven’t hit rock-bottom. For the first couple years you have a superhero duality going on. You be your normal self in your day to day office job and then you come home, shower up, put on your bar clothes, read a bunch of pick-up stuff, do affirmations in the mirror, listen to positive happy music, get yourself pumped up, go out and socialize, then come home and crash and in the morning you go back to the normal life. It’s very Fight Club at first.

But down the road that smooths out and who you’ve been “acting out” becomes who you are. It’s no longer any kind of act, you now know yourself inside and out and have a heightened sense of self-awareness that you realize most people will never have because they’ve never been forced to look at themselves that hard.

The thing with pick-up is that you condense a lot of experience into a very short period of time (because you missed out on a big chunk of life experience that others got to have). In 10 years, most people will probably go out to a social event four times a month. That’s 480 socializing nights in 10 years. They’ll probably talk to and make a connection with someone who’s not in their social circle maybe twice a month (and that’s being generous). So they’ll have experience in maybe 240 in-depth social interactions with total strangers in 10 years. Maybe once or twice a year they’ll make a new friend they regularly hang out with. So say 20 people in 10 years.

A PUA is encouraged to go out to social environments (whether it’s a bar, festival, mall, busy street, college campus, etc.) 4+ times a week, but most people can’t make that work due to other life responsibilities so say just twice a week, Friday and Saturay nights. And each night he sets of a goal of speaking to at LEAST 5 new people, so he gets experience at in-depth social interactions with 10 complete strangers in a weekend. 40 a month, 480 in a year, 10 years down the road he’s met 4,800 new people and, in those interactions, attempted to take them from just surface level “how about this weather we’re having?” to seducing them or simply getting to know them in-depth as a person. A PUA always grabs phone numbers and contact info to stay in touch because he’s always happy to expand his social circles because that’s part of the process, so he keeps in some level of touch with probably half the people he meets. And say even a quarter of those become good friends…in 10 years that’s a solid 1,200 new friends VS the normal person’s 20 new friends.

Imagine how well you would know yourself and be able to communicate with others if you had 60x the socializing experience you have now. And that’s just for the average 2-nights-a-week-er, let alone the guys who go out 4 - 7 days a week.

• TWTTWN

[Jimmy_Chitwood]

@Argent_Towers

My point is that people have to work at getting laid just like they have to work at everything in life. What’s so tough to understand about this? Nothing in life is free. Nobody has an objective “right” to anything. “Rights” are a concept that we thought up to govern our idea of a civil society.

You’re not arguing anything that’s in contention in this thread. Nobody begrudges anybody their “work,” except when it harms somebody else. What’s so tough to understand about that?

[Argent_Towers]

When Le Jaq rhetorically asked if men who can’t get laid should “know their place,” you said, “well, yeah.” That is what I am arguing against. Nobody ever has a “place” in life that is some rigid and unmoving thing.

[you_with_the_face]

@ywtf

but at the same time, you wouldn’t expect her to go online and brag about this buffoonery.

@TheWhoTheWhat

That’s because no one says doing that won’t work. We all know it works.

No “we all” don’t know that. It was mentioned earlier that women sometimes play dumb and silly to attract manly attention, and one of the first things pointed out (by a man, I might add) was this might be a way to attract jerkface douches, but not a good way to attract a quality mate.

Similar things are being said about PUAs. Sure, the techniques might get you laid, and if that’s the only metric you’re going by for “success” then that’s great. But it’s not unreasonable to question the quality of women you’re attracting by going through PUA machinations. And also the sustainability of the whole thing.

If you are naturally a low status male (whatever this means, has it been defined yet?) and you portray yourself as a higher status one, you may have her fooled for one night, maybe two. But eventually the real you will have to come out, right? If the reality is that you have few friends, live in a 2-bdr apartment with two other guys who hate your guts, and work at the Geek Squad section of Best Buy, there’s only so long that you’re going to be able to convince a woman that you’re really some big-baller shot-caller type. Trust me on this. There’s only so long that the illusion of popularity and alpha maleness can last. A woman with two brain cells will be able to sniff out the lie soon enough.

How long would it take for a man to notice that his date stuffs her bra and has vaginal odor despite her best attempts to cover it up with perfume? It’s just like that.

I contend that guys who truly have a hard time scoring with women (not just the hottie hotties but all of them), there’s more going on than just low status. Why do I say this? Because I know of plenty of guys who are broke and uneducated who get laid on the regular. And it’s not like they’re hiding their status either; they are just unapologetic about it. If you’re confident and willing to take the initiative to actually talk to a woman, that’s more than half the battle, seriously.

You seem to focus on lot of status, but the reality is that this is what men care about, not women. (Likewise, men don’t care about breasts size half as much women like to think they do…if they did I sure as hell wouldn’t be getting any.) Yes, women want a strong male who is not a weakling and is self-assured, yaddayaddayadda. But we’re not all chasing after alphas, and so it’s silly for an omega male to posture like an alpha when he doesn’t have to.

[TheWhoToTheWhatNow]

@you_with_the_face

And also the sustainability of the whole thing.

If you are naturally a low status male (whatever this means, has it been defined yet?) and you portray yourself as a higher status one, you may have her fooled for one night, maybe two. But eventually the real you will have to come out, right? If the reality is that you have few friends, live in a 2-bdr apartment with two other guys who hate your guts, and work at the Geek Squad section of Best Buy, there’s only so long that you’re going to be able to convince a woman that you’re really some big-baller shot-caller type. Trust me on this. There’s only so long that the illusion of popularity and alpha maleness can last. A woman with two brain cells will be able to sniff out the lie soon enough.

I specifically said (numerous times in this thread):

@TheWhoToTheWhatNow

For the first couple years you have a superhero duality going on. You be your normal self in your day to day office job and then you come home, shower up, put on your bar clothes, read a bunch of pick-up stuff, do affirmations in the mirror, listen to positive happy music, get yourself pumped up, go out and socialize, then come home and crash and in the morning you go back to the normal life. It’s very Fight Club at first.

But down the road that smooths out and who you’ve been “acting out” becomes who you are. It’s no longer any kind of act, you now know yourself inside and out and have a heightened sense of self-awareness that you realize most people will never have because they’ve never been forced to look at themselves that hard.

I know I write a lot, but if you’re not going to read what I’m writing then I’d appreciate you not making up arguments to things I’m saying the exact opposite of.

@you_with_the_face

Because I know of plenty of guys who are broke and uneducated who get laid on the regular. And it’s not like they’re hiding their status either; they are just unapologetic about it. If you’re confident and willing to take the initiative to actually talk to a woman, that’s more than half the battle, seriously.

That’s because you define status as “not being broke” and “being educated”. Those aren’t the same things a woman instinctually considers high status. High status is being unapologetic, like you say. It’s taking initiative, it’s leading a group, it’s being respected, it’s being chased by other women, etc.

It has absolutely nothing to do with money or education. That’s why the rich lawyer in the Armani suit with his Ferrari parked outside and 6-pack abs can’t understand why a guy like me who is broke with a beer belly can take girls from him. My high value is internal, not external, and women instinctively sense that.

@you_with_the_face

Yes, women want a strong male who is not a weakling and is self-assured, yaddayaddayadda. But we’re not all chasing after alphas

…and an alpha to you is NOT a strong male who is not a weakling and is self-assured?

An alpha doesn’t have to be the rich 6-packed captain of the football team. An alpha can be an introverted artist who’s just very dedicated/passionate about things in his life and has such a strong frame that other people are sucked into it naturally…Johnny Depp is this kind of alpha. VS the Steve Stiffler “in your face” alpha.

• TWTTWN

[Hank_Beecher]

@DigitalC

It doesn’t really matter. ** The grand majority of the human race has absolutely no problem getting laid**, there is 7 billion of us after all.

It doesn’t matter for the human race as a whole, no. But the part I bolded is flat out wrong. Historically 80% of women reproduce but only 40% of men. So the average man is cut out of the “game” and the above average dude gets two women. One can see this dynamic playing itself out endlessly in situations elaborated on in this thread as well as things that have happened throughout history like wars and ships full of men braving near certain death searching for new terrain to expand into.

Now the question remains as to what degree PUA advise is operating in a zero sum game environment. Maybe some of it can help a guy escape from the bottom 60% of guys into someone worthy of sniping one of a higher status guy’s two women, so in the end maybe 50% of guys could be getting some from the 80% of women who are getting some. Or maybe it could even help some of the lower status guys be confident enough to make themselves available to the bottom 20% of women who would otherwise lose life’s cruelest game of musical chairs. Maybe in that case 50% of men could be getting some from 90% of women. But my opinion is that these million year old parts of our nature are very very persistent even when we are aware of them and always seem to crop back up. Thus I feel it is very much more likely that it is just another version of the ancient animal tactic of mimicry and that when one becomes a PUA, effectively trojaning his way into the set of the upper 40% of men, that some other poor schmuck, likely a more genuine guy, has lost his seat at the table.

[DigitalC]

I’m sure 60% of men die virgins…

[Hank_Beecher]

@Hank_Beecher

Historically 80% of women reproduce but only 40% of men.

I found a cite: http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

[you_with_the_face]

@TheWhoToTheWhatNow

…and an alpha to you is NOT a strong male who is not a weakling and is self-assured?

Keep in mind that there are a lot of men who occupy the gulf between leading the pack and being at the bottom. The leaders do not have a monopoly on strength and other prized traits. And alpha males have negative traits too. Overly competitive types are often stubborn, poor listeners, and don’t take criticism very well.

The vast majority of men are not alphas (this just makes statistical sense), and women understand this very well.

Personally, I don’t want an alpha male. In my experience, these guys are image conscious in a way that makes me uncomfortable, since I’m not an image conscious person at all. They also tend to engage in controlling behavior, like ordering (yes, ordering) me to do certain things with my appearance to please them. None of this goes over very well with me. It causes me to roll my eyes and run away.

Women don’t want wimpy men and we’re attracted to confidence, but you don’t have to carry yourself like a silver-back gorilla to be strong. That’s all my point is. The average shy guy really doesn’t need to completely re-invent himself just to get laid. They don’t have to adopt alpha male bravado either.

[Argent_Towers]

TheWhoToTheWhatNow has been taking time and effort to write out detailed, articulate posts and nobody is listening to him.

An alpha male doesn’t need to be highly image conscious and he doesn’t need to be the kind of guy who orders you around. As our PUA just said two seconds ago, there are different kinds of alphas but what they have in common is being sure of themselves, having conviction in their own identity, and being decisive.

A shy guy does need to reinvent himself to get laid. Being shy means you are uncomfortable talking to people. This is a gigantic barrier to getting laid.

It’s clear from everything TWTTWN has said that what matters is what you say and how you act. Not what you look like, dress like, etc.

[you_with_the_face]

@Argent_Towers

TheWhoToTheWhatNow has been taking time and effort to write out detailed, articulate posts and nobody is listening to him.

An alpha male doesn’t need to be highly image conscious and he doesn’t need to be the kind of guy who orders you around. As our PUA just said two seconds ago, there are different kinds of alphas but what they have in common is being sure of themselves, having conviction in their own identity, and being decisive.

The truth is we can redefine alpha so that it means all kinds of things. In my experience, guys who label themselves as alphas and embody the traits that get them labeled as alphas by other people, also exhibit controlling, image conscious behaviors.

If all TWTTWN is really saying that shy guys should work on being more confident and decisive, irrespective of their projected “alphaness”, that’s really not all that groundbreaking. The thing that grates for me is the emphasis on status.

When men say they find confident women sexy, are they talking about their status? When we advise women to act confident, as we telling them to defy evolution and beat the system by going after men above their social pay grade? Of course not. When it comes to women, we put things in simpler, less adversarial terms. No one, male or female, wants a shrinking violet type who needs constant validation. Making men to be especially different this regard is unmerited.

My apologies if TWTTWN is saying things that I haven’t read (I admit I haven’t read it all). He’s written a lot just be saying something like “women like confident men”, which I think no one could possibly disagree with. I guess I disagree on the general principal that male-female dynamics requires lengthy analysis to begin with, but YMMV.

[Spice_Weasel]

I agree with you with the face. Women are all in the middle too. Some of us are really into status and image, others of us are hippies living in dirt huts, and there are a lot of us somewhere in the middle, happy with our economy cars and Ti-Vo. That is the beautiful thing about the world - we come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and flavors so chances are, someone’s going to float your boat.

Which is not to negate the fact that some people are socially awkward and do have a rough time of it - I am notoriously attracted to those guys because they generally don’t spend all their time thinking about dating, and neither do I. One thing often overlooked about shy people is that we have a pretty complex and well-developed inner world because we spend less time talking and more time thinking. That’s not a slam on extroverts - I LOVE surrounding myself with extroverts and I know plenty of brilliant people who will just dive into any situation - but the ‘‘hanging back, taking it all in’’ style is much more how I roll, and is what I find sexy. (Also, just to add some nuance to your ‘‘types’’ of women - consider that some of us are shy AND confident with who we are.)

TWTTWN, you seem like a genuinely nice guy, and I’m not at all convinced you weren’t already a nice guy before you discovered ‘‘The Game.’’ I am totally happy for you that you’ve become more comfortable expressing yourself. And I respect that it was kinda risky being that forthright in an atmosphere that is at best skeptical of your intentions and motivations. You actually make casual dating seem kind of fun, and I’ll admit it’s never something I have ever wanted to do. Your approach is generally a turn-off for me because I’m more of the monogamous touchy-feely type and try to stay within a 50 foot radius of bars and clubs at all times - but I would totally like you as a friend if I met you in person (as long as you laid off the date-rape jokes. AFAIK I’m not humor impaired, but that’s just creepy.)

I also think there’s something to your spiel on physical contact. Back in the day, when my husband was just an acquaintance, we bumped into each other rounding a corner and he put his hand on my arm to steady me. I wasn’t even aware at the time that I was attracted to him, but I remember feeling a little flutter of surprise and interest and how I saw him differently after that. I’m not suggesting he had anything close to game (shy guys, remember? I had to totally put myself out there to get with him), but there’s something to a perfectly well-timed touch.

[you_with_the_face]

@Argent_Towers

A shy guy does need to reinvent himself to get laid. Being shy means you are uncomfortable talking to people.

There are plenty of introverted shy guys who manage somehow to get laid. Some women are attracted to strong, silent types. Shy guys often pair up with women who are more than happy to take the reigns. Especially if a shy guy is good looking.

It’s like saying a woman with a flat chest has to reinvent herself to get laid. No she doesn’t, she just has to have more than breasts to offer someone.

[suranyi]

@Hank_Beecher

It doesn’t matter for the human race as a whole, no. But the part I bolded is flat out wrong. Historically 80% of women reproduce but only 40% of men.

Even if that’s true (and I’d sure like to see a cite for it), it doesn’t mean that only 40% of men get laid in their lifetime. That’s absurd.

Heck, there was nobody who was a bigger nerd than me, or who was shyer than me, or who was as bad as me in social situations. Yet I managed to get laid.

[Le_Jacquelope]

@you_with_the_face

If we’re going to compare apples to apples, let’s stick with behaviors. Makeup on women is not comparable to adopting a whole set of behaviors to mimic a personality that you don’t naturally have. Makeup has more in common with grooming than it does with PUA. Unless yall are going to start calling men who shave and wear styling gel in their hair phony, let’s let it go.

Plenty has been said of women who look worlds different when you wake up next to them than when you meet them out and about.

Look at the before and after’s of Tawny Kitaen. Minus her criminal behavior, of course.

(And yes, women with fake breasts get laughed out for being phonies all the time. Search some threads on this board.)

Yet fake breasts are as common as tax returns.

A Plain Jane type could probably get laid more often if she acted more giggly, helpless, and sexual provocative in a seemingly innocent manner (e.g. allowing herelf to have “maldrobe malfunctions” while dancing). Maybe you wouldn’t judge her for going to such lengths to get laid (I kind of doubt that though), but at the same time, you wouldn’t expect her to go online and brag about this buffoonery, would you?

I wouldn’t have any qualms if she did. You gotta change and adapt. Same rules for him. Same rules for her.

I’m glad you found something that helps you get what you want, but I get the sense that you want us to be impressed by the whole world that PUA has opened up to you. So let me ask you: if a woman got breasts implants to get laid, would you be all that impressed when she said it worked?

I cannot speak for him but I say.. whatever works. The world boils down to two kinds of people - those who have the competitive edge and those who don’t. Same rules for him. Same rules for her.

[Le_Jacquelope]

@Jimmy_Chitwood

Well, yeah.

What’s the alternative? You think it’s some kind of human right that somebody must let you get all up in it? You’re not entitled to sex. That’s what this all boils down to.

Is that the best you can come up with?

There’s at least two more options here.

Option 1 = Change and adapt to what women want in a man. Or, if you’re a woman, change and adapt to what men want.

Option 2 = Wait forever for Mr/Ms Right to come along.

It all depends on how badly you want to not be lonely. You gotta do what it takes, whether it’s the male/female PUA-equivalent or whatever.

[Beware_of_Doug]

Pickup presents itself as too perfect a system - too infallible, too guided by absolutes, universals, and natural “truths.” The fault is always with you, the individual.

That’s why I’m never going to believe in it. Maybe I’m just too old (mid 40s) or too cynical. You might need the idealism of youth to really follow it and get results.

My problem has always been being unable to buy into the bullshit of life for long enough to learn the dance and build real connections with others.

And Jacq, if all that matters is the competitive edge, we are living in Fight Club.

[Belowjob2.0]

I agree with Roissy that one of the best reasons for learning game is to hold on to the woman you already have.

I honestly believe that the Eat Pray Love Lady and Sandra Tsing Loh would still be married to their previous husbands if those husbands had used more game, and not been such nice guys.

The other side of this is the widely held belief in the PUA community that married women are much easier to pick up than single women. In my experience, this is absolutely true, and a good reason for men in general to learn game. Not to pickup random chicks, which does indeed get tiresome as you get older, but to keep the woman you already have from losing interest and unleashing her inner slutty 16 year old girl.

[Hank_Beecher]

@suranyi

Even if that’s true (and I’d sure like to see a cite for it), it doesn’t mean that only 40% of men get laid in their lifetime. That’s absurd.

Heck, there was nobody who was a bigger nerd than me, or who was shyer than me, or who was as bad as me in social situations. Yet I managed to get laid.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

Of course more than 40% of men get laid in their lifetimes now in the West. One thing a non-polygamous marriage culture does is facilitate pairing off, but even among marriages you can see the same pattern with some guys getting divorced and having second families, or even having multiple families concurrently, women effectively sharing high status men rather than settling for a lower status. Once you get into the dating or scene things revert very quickly to the underlying fundamental monkey forces. It is my contention that among groups of people who either are or who would like to be promiscuous that, as a general rule, 4/10ths of the guys are sharing 8/10ths of the women. I have seen this pattern exert itself in too many dozens of completely varied circumstances to think otherwise.

[Hank_Beecher]

Not that I think that in her most sober frontal lobed moment that the average woman wants to share a man with another woman, just that in the heat of the moment the guy that she lets stick it in her tends to be a guy that another girl, also in the heat of the monkey moment, has recently given herself too.