The story so far…
Please discuss 
Sorry, wanted to get all that in one post before replying again.
I suppose “It’s just oogy” isn’t really a good answer, huh? 
So I’m trying really hard to articulate WHY I find these sorts of newletters/seminars/books/advice columns oogy, and so as a result this sounds way too clinical and overthought, but here you go:
Unconsciously, things like understanding body language and responding appropriately tell us a lot of Darwinian level things about people. They tell us they were raised by people like us, probably sharing our values. They tell us that this person is sensitive to our needs, and when we’re gored by a mastadon or sick with the flu, they’re likely to help us get better, instead of walking by obliviously. In this particular example, “good hands” trigger a Mama Bear’s desire for a strong sensitive mate who will be willing to hold a baby in those hands and be sensitive enough to the baby’s needs to not let it starve or sit around in a wet diaper.
So you’ve got guys like this…Mystery, is it? That’s his name?..who have been able to determine and articulate these cues that women subconsciously want to see, and he teaches them to otherwise clueless people. He’s not teaching them to BE sensitive and caring, he’s teaching them to ACT sensitive and caring.
I’ve got one friend who’s really into these sorts of things, and it’s so, so oogy. It’s all a checklist to him. Nothing is about finding a woman who can make him happy or finding a woman he can make happy, it’s all about playing the game, marking off the boxes on his mental checklist, and appearing as if he were a sensitive suave “catch”. When he does manage to hook a hottie, he has no idea what to do with her! A month or two into it, tops, and she realizes that he isn’t at all what he appeared to be, in fact he’s sort of an overly intellectual nerd with no body awareness at all. Which, if he went out and met women who was looking for an overly intellectual nerd with no body awareness at all, would be just wonderful! But he’s so hooked into these systems and so down on himself that he feels he has to pretend to be what he’s not in order to get affection. I’m not sure who’s more manipulated, to be honest, him or the women he goes after.
He’s a really great guy. If he’d just BE that guy, he’d find a wonderful geeky woman who’d adore him. Instead he has one miserable short term relationship a year and hates himself while finding another book to read or seminar to pay for. That makes me sad.
Exactly this.
I used to know a guy who was into this stuff. He’s actually pretty good looking and wouldn’t have had that much trouble getting girls if he didn’t have such major confidence issues (also big issues with trusting women).
IMO this stuff is pretty directly equivalent to “The Rules” except it’s aimed at men. Both systems play on the person’s insecurity, and convince them that they will never get a boyfriend/girlfriend unless they follow certain behaviours that make them attractive. Both are based on the assumption that if you be yourself, are honest and act naturally then no-one will want to go out with you. And both are probably good for getting dates in the short term but terrible for forming relationships based on anything other than a lie.
That “Kino test” is freaking creepy. What is it testing, how compliant the woman is, and how likely she is to put up with a man physically jerking her around as if she were a little puppet? It sounds like the sort of thing a rapist would do to be sure his intended victim was a docile type who would be easily intimidated and not fight back.
You make several good points. I agree with most of your post actually. The way your friend is going about things is all wrong. Still, from what I’ve read from JoeSki (IIRC) in the past, your friend is not really using the wisdom of the PUA community in the correct way. I think the point is not to manipulate or deceive women by masking yourself with a finely honed layer of charisma and suavette (a word I just made up :D). The point is to incorporate these attractive qualities into yourself. IMO it’s a good thing to have body awareness, to be fun and playful, to be charming, to have high social value, etc etc. PUA is a system that teaches men how to be these things. Speaking from my limited experience with Mystery and his ilk, PUA-stuff is knowledge that many men just don’t learn by themselves or from their friends, and like all knowledge it’s a power that can used for good or for ill.
This compacted snippet rubs me the wrong way, in a similar manner to your ‘oogy’ feeling above. I don’t see anything wrong with your friend learning how to be suave, but to do so in order to pick up and meet chicks that are more compatible with him. I think it stems from my whole pet issue of nerd identity. It’s probably just my bitterness, but in your post you almost make geeky women sound like a consolation prize, like he should just resign himself to embracing all their stereotypical negative attributes. Before I ramble on further, let me explain using myself as an example.
I am like your friend, an overly intellectual nerd. However, I’m also very outgoing. I like staying at home and playing videogames, but I also like sometimes dressing up and going to the club. While I might enjoy talking about Star Wars more than footballl, I’ve learned how to get along with people and enjoy talking about all sorts of non-nerdy things. I think it’s a bad thing to be the stereotypical nerd who lacks social skills, hygiene, awareness of things outside their field, therefore I strive to be well-rounded and hip.
The problem with my identity being so chameleon-esque is that I end up often not fitting into any clear social group. I’m often too cool for the dorky crowd, and not cool enough for the hip crowd. What are my options? I’ve decided that my best bet is to embrace my love of nerdy things while at the same time making myself attractive socially, to make myself a better person deepdown. This means learning how to cook, get in good shape, exercise, AND learning the tactics of the PUA community.
Basically I feel that after years of alternating between phases of pure ‘just being myself’ and pure ‘trying-to-be-something-i’m-not’ and getting bad results from both from the female persuasion, I’ve realized I have to do two things: One, mask and and morph my personality at times, (but only in ways that make me feel true to myself!) and two, make myself fundamentally more attractive. The PUA community can help with that. Just telling somebody to ‘be yourself’ might sound good, but it always rubs me as being oversimplistic and trite. I know that’s not how you meant it in regards to your friend, but there you go.
Did that make any sense? Did it have anything to do with the OP? Geez… I’m a total scatterbrain today.
As for it sounding creepy, I think it’s because of how everything is removed from context. The whole PUA is very pseudo-psychological, so it can sound very cold and clinical. Still, that doesn’t mean the behavior is wrong or unethical.
I think it does stem from your bitterness, because that’s not what I mean at all. In fact, I find “hottie” women, or at least the ones he’s always trying to get into bed (because these guys say he can, in 12 easy steps), to be the lesser ones. I’m sure that’s my own bitterness, and there’s really nothing wrong with them, they’re just not a good match.
I’ll be totally honest: I’ve had something of a crush on him for years. He’s poly and I’m poly and we’re great friends, but because I’m overweight, he won’t look at me as a potential romantic partner. When I say if he’d just be himself, he’d find a wonderful geeky girl who’d adore him, I’m kinda talking about me, or someone like me.
This is, in broad strokes, an issue I’m struggling with right now in my life, and dating has nothing to do with it. Well, almost nothing. I’m female, thirtysomething, totally inexperienced with dating, hearing my biological clock tick with a vengence, and really, it’s not the baby or parenthood thing whose potential loss I’m morning, it’s the partnership thing. You know, when my sister-in-law drives my brother to the doctor, so there are two sets of ears to hear about his medical problems. Or when sis-in-law drives my brother to visit her parents because he’s not feeling well and the trip was already planned (Thanksgiving). Or her mother worries about what Thanksgiving will be like after her father-in-law passes away. (Family tradition involves the whole family gathering at his farm. The farm will likely stay in the family, but the farmhouse may not, and who else would want to host this horde of relatives?)
So anyway, it’s been hinted that some of my issues might have a label out there somewhere, and with the right therapist, I can cure myself, and make myself normal.
And there’s this big part of me which says “I don’t CARE what normal is, I like me the way I am, and anyone who doesn’t can jump in a lake”.
And there’s another part of me which says “But I’m incredibly lonely, I’m cripplingly shy, I cry too much over stupid stuff (like this post), I’m chronically un(der)employed and petrified of a “real” job, and some days I don’t respect myself very much. Wouldn’t it be nice to fix some of that?”
And the answer is I don’t know. I don’t deal well with change. Change is scary. I’d rather be stuck in a rut I’m not suited for than try something new and different. But I don’t much like this rut. And I’d hate to be fifty something, with my biological clock run out, still reluctant to try the latest electronic dating service because I still don’t believe I have anything to offer someone.
Now, I’m not sure that the guy you talk about has anything in common with me. And yes, it sounds like he needs help not so much with the “how to pick up girls” as he does with the “what to do when you’ve got one”, and maybe he’d benefit from someone a little more willing to figure things out with him. And maybe to do that, he should be himself and seek out women who are more like him–but maybe not, I mean “birds of a feather flock together” but “opposites attract” as well.
It makes more sense if you think of it in terms of a David Attneborough Nature Documentary.
This whole PUA thing baffles me. Well, no, not entirely. It makes sense if your goal is to be Barney Stinson and you just want to score with equally vapid people and have short, shallow relationships. I’m sure that process goes easier if everyone has a playbook to follow.
But I don’t get how this technique is supposed to help you find something beyond a one-night stand. If you want to find your perfect match, you have to be yourself. That’s it. That’s the secret.
It’s like losing weight: You eat less and exercise. Anything else is farting around with crap that someone probably sold you.
I have the same problem with this kind of thing that I have with the book He’s Just Not That Into You, which is that if you are approaching dating from a set of rules that don’t really apply to you at all your relationship will eventally crash and burn because the person your SO started dating wasn’t the real you in the first place. If you start off seeming all suave and secure and then 3 months in after you know they are in for the long haul you get comfortable to expose your insecure underbelly that isn’t fair to them. How would you like it if your girlfriend suddenly went from sweet and calm to freakishly paranoid or from energetic and talkative to a shy homebody?
No, it’s creepy because it’s a “compliance test”. Not a test to see if the woman is interested in the guy, or even just interested in having sex with someone that night, but a test designed to determine how willing the woman is to both do as the man wants and put up with him literally yanking her around. If you don’t see anything unethical about going around testing strangers to see how easily they can be manipulated to serve your own ends then there’s nothing I can do for you.
There’s nothing at all wrong with what msmith537 described as “those little touches that people give each other to express interest”, and I don’t have any particular objection to advice for men about how best to go about doing this. But the “Kino test” described was not “comfortable and fun” or “playful, light, and innocent”, it was quite openly intended as a test of how easily a woman can be mentally and physically manipulated.
On a lighter note, I heard on the radio this morning about a recently published book called How to Talk to Girls. The author is a nine year old boy, but his quoted advice seems like something many grown men could benefit from, like don’t be a show-off, don’t overdo the compliments, don’t act too desperate, and “comb your hair and don’t wear sweats”.
I had to look up “PUA” to understand this stuff, and I’ve got to say that’s some of the funniest stuff I’ve read in a long time. It screams “pathetic!” to me.
When you’re on a date, just relax and be yourself. People make too much out of the first few dates by setting the date up to be more than it is. It’s just two people who think they might be interested in each other finding out if they truly are. If they both are, great! If not, no big deal. There are a bazillion other people out there, getting yourself too invested it someone you barely know is not healthy. So just relax, and be yourself.
Now, I’m off to send these silly PAU websites to my friends who probably would appreciate some laughs.
Does he know this? Have you told him?
You’re a hottie. Why would he not try it on you?
I just don’t see this. I gather this from it:
It seems less about manipulation than about establishing a bond of some sort. I don’t see a problem with it in that light, but yeah, if the person is doing it to somehow test compliance and not interested in the other aspect, then it’s weird.
The description quoted comes right out and says it’s a test of compliance! The author can tack on any BS rationalization he likes at the end (yeah, it’s a real exciting turn on for a woman to have a strange man grab her hands and start yanking them around), but the description of the actual “test” is quite open about the real intent behind this little activity.
Reread the description, it doesn’t really sound like yanking. They’re standing next to each other and the person doing this is essentially holding her hands and moving them back and forth - of course if she finds him and the hand-holding interesting, she might well keep holding onto his hands, which helps build attraction. I don’t see how this is that different from the advice to women about where to touch a man, how often, etc., and how long you should wait to call him back. They’re all techniques for gauging and building interest.
Well, I’m not involved in the community enough to know if you’re right or not, but that’s not the vibe I got from it at all. I think his use of ‘compliance’ was poor wording; that’s all. No rape or mental domination implied.