That website is a thing of beauty. It’s like a horrible accident that I can’t turn away from. I may have to quit my job. I can’t stop reading.
Even better to dress so you look like an exotic fowl that’s about to molt:
First of all, you might want to rethink the order. I found that girls tend to freak out when a stranger comes over and takes one of their friends away.
Apparently there is actually a PUAHate.com website.
http://puahate.com/showthread.php?t=52355
Check out the first guy. He’s some dorky doctor who discovered the whole PUA thing after his wife divorced him. Now a lot of what he is talking about makes sense (most scams have a ring of truth), until he mentions that he’s a “sexual hypnotist”.
The guy actually reminds me of a former coworker. This dude used to practice those same PUA techniques and ended up creeping out nearly every girl in the office. But his Facebook profile has lots of pictures with him and girls who look like Russian prostitutes doing the “head lean” thing.
Can we please please puhleeze get a faux nature documentary (narrated by David Attenborough of course) about Pick Up Artists in action?
It’s also a matter of earned social credit. A friend I’ve known for several years has had that long to be supportive of me, spend time with me, and in general be a friend to me. Some dude I just met has zero of that. So just like I’d respond better to a friend’s request for a loan of $50 than from a stranger on the street; so I respond better to teasing from people I know than from someone I don’t. A stranger cannot presume upon me at the same level as a friend and expect to get a positive response – he’d have to earn it first.
Also, making personal comments to strangers strikes me as pretty socially clueless. Grown-ups know better, which tells me there’d be some extreme compatibility issues with this guy, to put it nicely.
Are you assuming that guys who suck at dating don’t do any of these things?
Because that wasn’t my experience. I was involved in the PUA thing in the early days, I helped organize a number of events / group sessions (yeah we charged money but didn’t make a lot out of it and never expected to). And there were people of a whole range of backgrounds, many very successful in their careers and plenty of funny and interesting guys.
And they didn’t necessarily lack confidence. They just lacked confidence at dating. And it was understandable that they lacked confidence in this because most of them had a woeful dating history.
I know it’s difficult for people who’ve had a relatively plain-sailing love life (and if you been steadily dating since your teens, that’s “relatively plain-sailing”), but if you get your confidence dented at this early on, you can quickly find yourself in the vicious circle of bad outcomes and low confidence.
I don’t really understand how an interesting, funny, successful, generally confident guy could have that much trouble getting dates.
As he said, generally confident except about dating.
I wouldn’t describe myself as “generally confident”, but I’ll try to illustrate the point with my own personality problem: I have plenty of female friends. I like them just fine, I treat them like people, not conquests or objects. As far as I know, most people I know like me just fine, I get complements, and am generally sociable. The second I get a crush on one of my friends or think of them romantically? They will never hear from me again unless it’s by accident or quirk of fate. I will cut them off utterly and completely rather than risk them realizing I have a crush on them, because I can’t handle it. I will have anxiety attacks for a month, to the point of being literally physically ill.
Mind you, they could have been a good friend, even a best friend, who I taught a seminar with, or just hung out with for hours not the day before. Talking to them as a normal person. Not treating them differently from any of my male friends (well… within reason of course). But the very second I feel romantically inclined, I am a complete mess. I can’t see them, I can’t think about them. I will hyperventilate, get sick, be unable to enjoy video games or movies or any entertainment. I will cry, I will refuse to go outside or to the store. Does. Not. Work. Perfectly fine with women in general, great friends with several women (I’d say more women than men at the moment, actually), generally funny, at least moderately interesting, not unattractive. Not sure about “confident”, sometimes I am sometimes I’m not. But the prospect of romance or dating completely fucks me up.
I don’t think the people Mjinn is talking about are as bad as me, but I hope it at least illustrates the general gist.
Well, they can. Just like I know lots of people who are confident in general, but not at public speaking, say, I know lots of people who are confident in general but not when it comes to dating.
And I think this really is the crux of the issue.
I think some people are assuming that by talking about guys who are trying to improve their dating behaviour, we’re automatically talking about people who are failures in most respects, blame everyone else / misogynists, generally bad people who deserve everything they get.
Well, I’m not talking about people like that. Because I know so many guys who suck at dating that none of those things are true for.
Well, I guess it’s not impossible for there to be a significant number of them that are like that. I’d have to see it to really believe it, but I’m not going to be staking out a seminar or anything, and those Rico Suaves certainly didn’t shatter any of my preconceived notions, so I guess it will have to remain a mystery to me.
I haven’t read any of the books so I don’t claim to know that much about it, but if it’s just teaching men to cast a wide net and not put women on a pedestal, then great. But I get the idea it goes much further.
Because a lot of them are “nerds”. That is to say, they weren’t the popular outgoing jock in high school. Maybe they were the nice, friendly, smart kid who studied hard, went to a good college, didn’t party, landed a good job but worked a lot of long hours. Maybe they even got married young to the first or second girl who would have sex with them, but then divorced a few years later. So now you have a guy in his mid to late 20s or 30s. Educated, succesfull, but alone with not a lot of experience meeting women.
I mean do you even read this board? How many guys if someone said “we are going out to a bar tonight to try to meet women” would be excited and how many would shit their pants (or start a ten page thread about dating woes).
Let me give you a real world example. The other day, I’m at a technology Meetup in Manhattan. I’m chatting with a total stranger and he mentions that he has had a lot of trouble meeting single women in the city. I turn to the pretty Asian woman next to me and say “excuse me, are you single? Yes? Have you met [Hong or whatever not his real name was]?” See. Not that hard. Of course they are both a little shy so it doesn’t work out. But someone with a bit more confidence socially could have taken advantage of the opportunity a kindly stranger had provided and talked about their mutual interest in big data or whatever the heck we were there for.
I’ll back you up that I am dubious that a significant number of PUAs are in that boat, I just wanted to illustrate how such a thing was possible.
I think the Randian point would be – why take the trouble of helping someone by telling him that PUA is a scam. What’s in it for you? Let scam artists have their victims. It’s the libertarian way!
Thanks for this phrase, Kaio, it’s useful and expandable to this entire theme. For the bitter guys describing losers who seem to have nothing to offer yet still get dates… consider this. That “loser” you describe is only a loser by your standards. The pizza delivery guy may be terrific fun, easy-going, have a great family or social circle, may have interesting hobbies, may be kind to strangers and pets, have good taste in music and art… his company is probably more desirable than Dilbert’s.
And you’re still in sales, huh? Trying to convince Joe Average that he can’t compete without your widget. Don’t pretend you were providing a charitable service; you were separating gullible, insecure people from their money. Did you ever explain to any of your clients that any person with little to offer another or who has such an obsessive, singular focus on the opposite sex that he feels unable to approach others probably suffers from a medical condition and no amount of pimp training would put him at ease while trolling bars for women? Or did you continue to coach men to mine bars for flawed women, blame women for the “games they play”, ply them with alcohol, and view women as targets? If you taught PUA, you taught people who initially wanted to be with women the art of hating women.
The average guy is perfectly capable of meeting women and getting dates. He may not have the confidence to approach the most attractive woman at the bar, but that process is largely self-selecting. 20 year old movie High Fidelity had a line that reads pretty harsh, but is fundamentally true. “Box your weight”. Set your standards impossibly high, might as well stay home to cultivate your bitterness. Unless or until you have achieved some greater good than the guy next door such as a life-saving vaccine, most rushing yards in a season, or Indian chief of a rival tribe… you are in the same position as every other guy in your demographic.
Make a reasonable, honest assessment of your own debts and assets, cast a wide net, and practice friendliness on everyone until you get the hang of introductions and small talk.
No, I’m a neuroscientist.
And I wasn’t “in sales” then: it was something I was doing as a hobby in my own time. The fees we charged barely covered the costs of the venues. Sometimes not even that.
I got involved because I read The Game and it helped me immensely. Not in any specific advice but just the knowledge you can get better at this, and also an awareness that I could break down what I was doing wrong more concretely than “not confident enough”.
I wanted other people to experience a similar transformation.
From what I just said hopefully you appreciate how ridiculous this caricature appears to me.
Also note that a lot of the guys, the majority in fact, actually desired a serious relationship and I’m glad to say many achieved this goal.
IME the average guy struggles. Many frequently find it frustrating and end up settling down with basically the first woman that reciprocates.
Again, I don’t see the difference between sharing dating advice and advice on public speaking. In both cases we could argue that someone with an outstanding personality will shine through, but for the rest of us sharing some advice can be useful and does not demean anyone.
Because dating advice and advice on public speaking deviates significantly from the PUA movement and the techniques detailed in The Game. One is good social advice, the other preys on weaknesses and insecurities, resorts to trickery and manipulation, and promises unrealistic results.
feel free to post a link to whatever is the best. (save the rest of us some time)
There is a pretty good one discussing the virtues of having women as friends. A typical response would be “I guess maybe if I’m trying to fuck her, but otherwise, why bother?”
Well, at least we’re getting somewhere: you’re saying it’s OK to share dating advice, just that that’s not what you think the PUA movement is primarily about – that it’s about tricking women and conning men (interesting that it can somehow do both at the same time).
But of course as I’ve said I was involved in a number of PUA events that were about helping men to just be better dates, to everyone’s benefit. And I can certainly link forums where the vast majority of content is useful advice, not immature ones like the forum being linked here.
So do you appreciate that you may be talking about “some” or (if you insist) “much” of the PUA movement but that you shouldn’t generalize and call the whole thing a con / manipulation of women?
These statements of yours, Troppus, are the only ones in this thread that suggest to me that women are commodities. I read your statements as saying that any man is nothing more than the sum of his assets, and that he should be satisfied with the women who are valued at a price that he can afford. If that’s really the situation, then “landing” a woman really is just a commercial transaction and why not approach meeting women using sales techniques, with the hope that every salesman has one big fish to land in his career.
I’ve never read one of these books, but from the descriptions in this thread, the advice that PUA books give seem to me to be little more than exactly what you’re saying – cast a wide net to see if you can land the big fish.
And I really don’t know what kind of advice PUA books give, but if what it amounts to is “talk to more women” then I can’t really see that it does any social harm.