The Pick-Up Artist movement is a scam

In My Humble Opinion
121

The OP seemed pretty worked up over somethat that I thought was a fad like 5 years ago.

A pretty salesgirl like you should know the difference between “the truth”:dubious: and “the truth!”:smiley:

Oh I know what she wants.:cool:

I think you don’t understand how sales, or scams, or manipulation in general works. People always say “I never…I wouldn’t…blah blah blah” But if you can create an emotional connection to something, that can override logic and reason and lead people to make decisions they otherwise might consider foolish. And no matter how “together” someone appears, everyone has certain fears or desires that can be played upon. Often especially those people who appear the most together.

122

I think the negativity and misogyny actually does serve a useful purpose. I’d rather see this being done without it, of course. But I understand why it works.

In my experience, romantically challenged guys tend to start regarding attractive women as unapproachable creatures, removed from the realm of ordinary humans.This psyches them out, and undoubtedly makes their interactions weird and awkward. The misogyny serves to make attractive women seem a little more human, and a little more flawed, and thus more approachable.

Living up to some perfect ideal a guy has made up in his head without even knowing you is also not fun for a woman to deal with. If you’ve gone out to a club hoping to hook up with someone, you don’t want to be the subject of some dudes elaborate love fantasy he’s already planned down to the minute in his head. I think the misogyny also helps some guys be realistic about what they are going to get out of picking up girls at a bar. While you might meet your dream princess-wife-bunny, in reality you are probably going to find a cute-ish girl to hook up with for a bit. The misogyny helps guys take their expectations way down, and realize that they can still have fun with a less-than-perfect woman in a casual arrangement.

Likewise, I think a lot of romantically unsuccessful guys just have trouble imagining the normal, attractive, decent women actually are sometimes looking for a casual partner. Men sometimes think that women have magic sex lives, where wonderful men are constantly throwing themselves at our feet as we gleefully choose among the rich and handsome ones. They find it hard to believe that we are not necessarily looking for a walking wallet, and often we would be receptive to an ordinary guy who’s engaging and funny but otherwise unremarkable. Maybe the need to feel like they are “tricking” us into sleeping with them, as that’s the only way it reconciles in their head.

Anyway, for most people, experience tends to eventually fill in the gaps. If you meet and have fun with enough less-than-perfect women, eventually you start realizing that there is more to a good partner than chasing superficial physical perfection. Even if you have to use negativity to get up the guts to talk to a woman, eventually you are probably going to realize they are neither goddesses nor monsters, but just people like anyone else. I’ve somehow managed to meet a lot of these guys as friends, and eventually they get frustrated that they get lots of tail, but nothing ever seems to bud into a deeper relationship.

I think most guys eventually get bored of it and move on, the way most guys without a system eventually get bored of single life. Some stick too it, of course, but skeezy middle-agesters are hardly a new phenomena.

123

I think there’s a general impression that PUAs are misogynistic, meathead, frat boys that sleep with a different girl every night and brag about it to their bros while chugging Natty Light between fist bumps. I actually made it halfway through The Game before losing interest. I was surprised to learn that the target market for PUA “instructors” was the introverted, awkward guy playing World of Warcraft - not the confident, cocky quarterback.

Everyone knows men that are naturally good with women. All the PUA guys seem to be doing is mechanically breaking down what guys that are good with women do without thinking about it.

Make eye contact.
Present yourself well.
Be assertive.
Be playful.

It’s not exactly rocket science. Clueless guys aggressively “negging” people is a salient example, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily an accurate portrayal of what most PUAs are about. I think the ideal is to become indistinguishable from the guy that is just naturally good in social situations.

124

Your mouth says no, baby, but your eyes say yes! Nice eyes, by the way. I think cross-eyed chicks are hot. Especially with your kind of face. Symmetry is so boring. Hey, leaving so soon?

125

I was reading the first part of this message, and, not having read the entire thread, I was relieved to see somebody mention that shyness is not necessarily the problem. One can have no hesitation/fear about talking to any woman, even asking her out (or anything like that) and still get rejected immediately, or after the first or second date. Rejection does lead to feeling unappealing, and so on.

Losing my youth to dysthymia accounts for a lot of the rejection, but it also made the sadness worse.

But then I read the rest of the post, and it made me wonder… I mean, in my late teens, once I finally fessed up to being heterosexual rather than my desired asexuality, all I wanted was a meaningful relationship. I wanted someone to hold me and take away my sadness, and vice-versa. That seemed to be what all my favorite musicians were singing/playing about, and I identified.

In my sophomore year of university, I had a conversation with a friend, in which I said that I was reluctant to ask out a classmate, since I knew she would soon study abroad for a long time. His response was immediate and vociferous: “Oh, what do you want to do, OurLordPeace, get married?!?” I was speechless. I didn’t want to technically get married, but I sort of assumed that all of us classy people were after life-partners ASAP.

I mention all of this because people have recommended PUA materials to me every once in a while, but I really don’t care for it. I think the stuff about body language and conversation might be handy, but I don’t like the idea of trying to trick women, even if I’ve been desperate enough to try. It seems so phony. And besides, I still can’t fathom how people date (or anything comparable) without getting to know one another first. There are some deal-breakers (or deal-makers) that determine a person’s morality, and wouldn’t anyone want those out of the way first?

Forget shyness… what do you do if you’re terribly unattractive, or just awkward in other ways?

126

Salespeople should never take training or listen to advice from other salespeople, because no one can ever help them understand what their customers wants better than the customer, right? It’s also pretty stupid for women to talk to their friends about guys as well, right? Everyone should have that ability to be keen observers of human nature and instinctively understand what others want and need.

I’m only away of the PUA move from threads here on the Dope, as there isn’t a Japanese version, but my guess is that it doesn’t cover long term relationships and how to handle differences in parenting styles.

It’s for meeting people and getting them to be interested in you enough to go on a date. Not everyone is born with the ability to recognize if others are interested or not. Not everyone is a natural salesman. But, there are things you can learn which can help you. The best salesperson in the world can’t sell anything to everyone, so the claims are over the top, but no one is disagreeing with that, here. Getting advice on how to talk to people in bars does help.

127

Trom beat me to the punch, but I’ll echo it all the same.

The PUA movement isn’t so much a bunch of scammers setting out to make big bucks but rather a fringe online community growing organically to the point where they’ve deluded themselves to be so convincing that they in turn delude more lonely guys, snowballing in what we see today.

Pick up artists truly believe they possess tools, skills, and methods that can turn any guy into a cassanova when really it relies heavily on confirmation bias. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that they’ve codified it, even if there are different schools of thought.

The book “The Game” however isn’t so much a group of these rules but really the journey of a lonely journalist who set out to write a piece and gets sucked into this seedy world of pick and he writes an entire damned book out of the experience. There’s no way you could put pick-up rules in a whole book. They probably can only fill up a pamphlet.

128

If something can be learned, then surely it can be taught. Just thinking about picking up a girl at a bar, I can identify many problems/hurdles/necessary skills. A brief list:

(1) Identifying a girl
(2) Separating her from her friends
(3) Initial contact
(4) Gauging interest
(5) Having a decent conversation
(6) Closing the deal

Generally speaking most men pick up some semblance of these skills through practice and life experience. But if they don’t, why exactly can’t it be taught? If you don’t have any skills picking up women, someone who does telling you “Try X, Y, and Z it might work but don’t do A, B, and C because it won’t” is helpful. It’s no different than swimming or cooking or any other life skill that seems basic to people. It seems easy to us because we know how to do it, but if you didn’t then it wouldn’t seem quite so obvious. So there’s nothing inherent about PUA that makes it a scam.

Whether or not their advice is good or worth the money, I have no idea.

129

Good for you, but my sympathy would still be with you in that situation and not with the creep who kept bothering you. Because he would keep bothering you, at least if he’s following the Mystery Method and has decided that you’re the lady who’s going to be the next notch on his headboard. Remember, the Mystery Method is billed as being effective on literally ANY woman, and that includes women who say “no”. For the thread I link to below I browsed through as much of Mystery’s book as I could stomach, and I learned that his method is, in a nutshell…

…if you’re drinking a beverage right now you may want to put it down, because I think you’re going to get a big laugh out of this…

…when a woman shows “defiance” the man should “punish” her to gain “compliance”.

I use quote marks because those are the exact words he uses repeatedly throughout the book. Here is perhaps my favorite quote from a book that’s just full of gems: “People will also comply if there is a threat. A man with a gun gets more compliance than one with a hose. Of course a Venusian [pick-up] artist will never actually pull out a gun. But there are other ways to punish defiance.” (p. 148 of The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed)

I only know you from your SDMB posts, Nzinga, but based on that I figure that if a would-be pick-up artist kept bothering you after you told him to get lost then you’d have no trouble being “defiant” and telling him to get lost again, laughing in his face, summoning a bouncer, or whatever. For you, and I hope for most women, the unwanted pick-up attempt is probably no more than an annoyance. But if the question is who do I feel sorrier for, the man who pays money to learn how to be more annoying or the women he subsequently annoys, then my sympathies lie with the women.

I’d be pretty sure that some of them (although I hope a very small percentage) are in fact rapists. The self-proclaimed pick-up artist we had around here a while back bragged that a pick-up artist could rape a woman but convince her that it wasn’t rape. (He did this in a Great Debates thread about rape, not even in a thread about pick-up artists. He was Pitted and faded away soon afterward.) And as I’d pointed out in a thread on the thread about the “Mystery Method” about a year and a half before that, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed basically says that if a woman changes her mind about wanting to have sex then the man should just go ahead and rape her.

130

Just wondering if this is really anything new. There were “How To Pick Up Women” books advertised in comic books at least as far back as the 60s.

131

“Step 1: Kick sand in her puny boyfriend’s face…”

132

Hold on a sec let me write this down.

133

Probably not, except now the PUA bs is online for free. The proof that it could be worse than the comic book promises was in the thread that **Lamia **mentioned.

Lamia, I remember that guy. I didn’t believe him, actually, I don’t believe much that any PUA advocate says. They read like a pyramid schemer; full of unrealistic promises and overblown claims to success. But those online PUA communities are saturated with blowhards and posers with little if any dissension, so they do sound like diciples.

134

That’s ridiculous…

The REAL way to pick up chicks is to Be a Zebra!

But seriously, is negging functionally different from “teasing”? Because I’ve gone and looked up tons of negs and they seem to be the exact same thing, and I’m left being rather confused about how this is in any way novel. The negs read exactly how my friends and I tease each other.

135

You already have a relationship with your friends and know to avoid any sensitive topics. Approaching someone you don’t know with a put-down is nasty, and requires the PUA to study his target and find defects to draw attention to. One is good natured, affectionate teasing, the other is mean and foul mannered.

136

I think it’s pretty likely that TheWhoToTheWhatNow was a troll; what’s more troubling to me is that he had to go that far to get the board to turn on him. He’d been making ridiculous claims and generally being a total one-trick pony for a while and a number of posters seemed to think he was the coolest dude ever.

That depends. Do you tease your friends because you feel they’re being defiant and that you must punish them in order to cause them to comply with your wishes?

137

It also didn’t hurt that Courtney Love would hang out at their swingin’ bachelor pad. It’s like Steve Martin’s advice on how to become a millionaire:

“First, get a million dollars.”

A recently-divorced friend pestered me into buying that book to turn me into some kind of wingman. I’ve only thrown two books in the garbage vs. donating them after I was through. This was one of them.

138

So it’s a matter of intent? Okay, I suppose.

(And Lamia, no, of course not. That’s what my Iron Maiden and the Catherine Wheel is for, silly)

139

You become awesome, all by yourself first. You learn new things, find hobbies you love, join clubs, churches, or charitable organizations. Find a Toastmasters in your area. Talk to strangers, all of them. And listen, learn how to make small talk, learn how to find things to appreciate about others. Get out of your own head. Smile or say hi to passing strangers. Make yourself fun and interesting, treat self-improvement as you would any other hobby or project.

140

Yes, and it’s a matter of prudence.