Who probably let themselves go after getting married. Are you disputing that all things being equal, the fit and wealthy men will have much more dating opportunities?
There are guys like that who get girlfriends, too. I’ve known some.
No. I’m disputing that the fat, broke couch potato won’t have any.
The guy with a lot of money has a choice of more restaurants, also; and of more places to live. That doesn’t mean that the broke guy has to be dead on the street of starvation.
I’m also disputing that all other things are always equal. In this area, they’re never equal.
I’d say that if they don’t, being fat and broke isn’t necessarily the reason. I believe that anxious guys with little or no confidence are the ones who don’t get dates. I was steadily employed and “able to run a mile in 5 minutes” fit, but my anxiety, lack of confidence, and inability to tell when someone was actually interested did me in for many years.
Then we are in agreement because I never made that claim.
Agreeing with that.
A confident fat broke couch potato will probably get more dates than a more successful man that doesn’t have confidence.
Why is the fat broke couch potato confident? Who knows. Maybe just how he feeds off the input he gets from the world. Maybe he could do no wrong in Mama’s eyes. But the confident guys of that type don’t care, they’ll do what they want to get what they want and it works often enough.
Some of the actual successful players really do live in their mother’s basements.
I was too busy raising our kids during the years in question to notice the movement existed. I assume there were books, seminars, ect. What did the “experts” say about people the techniques didn’t work for? Did they acknowledge that these were techniques that didn’t work for everyone, or did they say they were fool-proof (with the implication that failure was because the person didn’t apply them correctly, or didn’t try hard enough)? It seems to me that the “movement” fails to take into account that neither the anxious/clueless/awkward men nor the women they want to attract are monolithic. I know more about Gilmartin’s “love-shy” ideas, only because I read most of the book due to hearing about him in this thread. While he gets that some men want to date/mate but are so crippled by anxiety that they are unsuccessful and that lack of success becomes a vicious cycle, I think he misses the boat on a lot. I get the feeling that he selected subjects who fit with his thesis. To hear him tell it anyone who can’t get dates due to anxiety asking women out also hated sports growing up and didn’t have male friends. Don’t even get me started on the “male lesbians” who wished they had been born women because it would have made it easier to date/mate with other women.
The point is, human behavior is complicated. If I knew how to put a dent in the number of people who want to date but aren’t able to make it happen I’d start making space on the mantle for my Nobel Prize.
In earlier threads on this matter I made the comment that some people saw even the “positive” PUA adversely because instead of flailing and stumbling and betting on their luck “like everyone else” PUA were somehow gaining unfair advantage by strategizing.
How to approach relationships succesfully is something one learns. But as with many other aspects, people who went through the normative path of socialization can grow to have the impression that learning “the normal way to go about this” is something that is just naturally absorbed from their surroundings.
So happens, though, many people, yes, DO need to be expicitly taught how to present themselves advantageously. As long as it stayed in the self-improvement realm it would have been no problem. As mentioned, however, for some it went spiraling down various rabbit holes.
If so one could say that he looked at it from the “magical thinking” worldview as opposed to the “apply yourself” angle.
No, I don’t think so. Dating/romantic advice is nothing new. Before The Game and He’s Just Not That Into You, there was the aforementioned The Rules in the mid-90s and years of monthly articles in Maxim about how to lie to women to get them into bed. (Of course, Cosmopolitan had been publishing articles for women on how to flirt for decades already.) Before that, there was Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The 80s birthed a whole generation of books like The New Male-Female Relationship, How to be Popular with Boys, and The Teen Dating Guide, right around the time the first Millennials were being born. The 50s and 60s gave us The Little Black Book: A Manual For Bachelors, articles in Men’s Health and Playboy about how to read a woman’s body language to know if she was secretly hot for you, and some truly hilarious PSA short films like What to Do on a Date and How to Succeed with Brunettes. And while not specifically aimed at romance, let’s not forget How to Win Friends and Influence People was first published in 1936.
Here’s a fun article on dating advice published during the late 19th through 20th century, so some of it before any Millennials’ parents were even born: Vintage Dating Advice That Failed the Test of Time
So no, it’s not about those silly Millennials being uniquely lacking in social skills as they cower behind their iPhones and avocado toast that they needed dating advice for the first time in history. There’s a lot more about the PUA movement that also wasn’t new: the magical thinking, the misogyny, the framing of dating as a conquest rather than a connection, had all been done before.
What strikes me as particularly of the moment about PUAs is that:
- the idea that nice girls don’t have casual sex was finally really most sincerely dead,
- but young people were actually having less sex than previous generations, and so
- there was this huge disconnect between how much sex people were having, and how much they assumed other people were having, and
- they suddenly had this expansive virtual space to get together and talk about it.
I think it eventually became a victim of its own popularity–the more people who had heard of it, the less plausible it was that this was the “secret” to getting girls.
I hope it was the last gasp of a dying breed. Today’s kids seem much more evolved; they’re into appreciating individual differences, seeking enthusiastic consent, and interrogating their assumptions. I hope we can leave them enough of a planet to try to build a society that doesn’t completely suck.
Excellent analysis
“Courtship is life’s nastiest little game”—I thought I saw that attributed to Ovid, but I can’t find a cite.
Some seemed to think there was some Jedi mind trick or something. Playing hard to get is a mind game. Fake it till you make it is a mind game. Playing games is just baked in. Remember the film “Singles”?
Some are better at reading the signs than others of course.
There was a series on VH1 or MTV where PUAs coached some guys and I saw some of the episodes long ago. One of the conclusions I gathered was that if a male is interested in a female, he shouldn’t show interest. That would be surrendering his power. One of the gambits was to pay attention to her friend (whom he’s not interested in) while he’s in the target’s presence. It’s like indirectly delivering the pitch, performing for her benefit while not appearing to care about her.
I also gathered it’s often a concerted effort—they play wingman for each other, setting each other up. They have ways of drawing attention without seeming to manufacture it. One had something to do with taking a flash picture in the bar so she’ll turn around to see what happened. She turns to see the guys are laughing, pretending to be oblivious to her and she wonders what good time she’s missing out on. Something like that.
IIRC they had special techniques for attracting strippers and the like. IIRC those women are really hard targets because they flirt to get men’s money but know how to keep their feelings out of it. One of the trainees, a chubby guy, actually cracked the code and was making out with a stripper (for zero dollars—she was into him).
The ethics of manipulating people like that? All’s fair in love and war (ruling out clearly illegal things like date rape drugs)? What was that dating term we had the thread about, “Dating for Dinner?” A person accepts a date yet has no real romantic interest—it’s all for the free meal.
And there’s all kinds of persuasion in everyday life, not just in the dating arena. How do advertisers make you want to buy their product instead of their competitor’s? How do salesmen make you think you’re getting a good deal? How does that preacher make some believe in an after life? Why would you vote for this candidate instead of that one? How many fall for Nigerian scams? Whenever we interact with the world we live in we better have our guard up. Why, I once made a deal for a car and the agreed-upon interest rate was 0.9%. They brought me the contract to sign and oops, how did that change to 6.9%? When confronted, they asked, “Oh, you wanted that interest rate?” Are you fucking kidding me? Bait and switch, misdirection, lying, exaggerations, half-truths, using confederates and so on are all things we’ve seen in different guises before.
It says:
Like many other techniques, the neg PUA method played on gender power dynamics and depended on women lacking confidence in order to manipulate them.
I guess the question for me is why women have low self-esteem on a such consistent basis that these techniques would work.
Latka the pickup artist 1
Latka the pickup artist 2
Latka the pickup artist 3
“Cracked the code”? Seriously? Why are you assuming that whatever combination of situation, appearance, and whatever he was doing that lead to that particular woman being into him was a “code” that would have automatically worked on anybody else?
Which women? Kindly stop talking about women as a monolith.
If whoever Latka is is actually getting laid (I’m not watching a batch of videos about it, and if they’re by Latka don’t want to give the clicks anyway), and not just making money writing about it, the reasons for each individual woman are going to vary. Some of them probably just wanted to get laid that night, and didn’t care if their partner was an ass. Others may have felt pressured, just as some men do, by the idea that everybody other than them was having sex and that there must be something wrong with them if they weren’t – which can be a self-esteem issue for people of any gender. Maybe some of them were drunk. Maybe some of them were afraid he’d get violent if rejected, possibly because that had happened to them before. And maybe some of them did have terrible self-esteem in general, for any or multiple of a batch of possible reasons – if whatever the technique is relies on low self-esteem to work, then what Latka’s presumably doing is knowingly hunting out vulnerable individuals in order to take advantage of their vulnerability.
It’s funny how you dismiss the ethical concerns as “all’s fair in love and war,” and then liken manipulative romantic tactics to Nigerian scams and dishonest car salesman bait-and-switches, one of which happened to you and made you very angry. So do you really think it’s “fair” for people to be dishonest and manipulative? Because saying that it is (and thereby excusing the behavior) is not the same as acknowledging that bad behavior exists and we need to protect ourselves from it.
Sorry I don’t know where to find it, but their advice was do this and not that. IIRC the PUAs said something like, “He’s owning his fat, like he’s a strip club owner.” In other words he had the confidence and even though he wasn’t a perfect specimen, his confidence overrode the shortcoming. But you know, the thing is that I can watch a world class chef say “Do this and do that” and follow him and still not have the touch, still not get the result…it’s more than that. With diligence, practice, and really internalizing the whys and hows of what he was doing, he got past her considerable radar.
Allow me to rephrase and elucidate.
I guess the question for me is why there are enough single, heterosexual women located in places such as bars (where meeting a partner is an objective) who also have low self esteem that these techniques would be successful. I’m not talking about girls under 18 or women who are already married or lesbians or anybody who wouldn’t be a target for the pickup artist. If the technique seem to target low self-esteem but these women have average or high self-esteem, then the techniques wouldn’t work, would they? Is the proof not in the pudding? A broken clock works twice a day but they would have you believe this works regularly.
Now, if you want to call bullshit, say that the methods don’t work and this is false advertising to sell the method then ok. But my hunch was that a lot of people dislike the fact that putting down the woman in order to get her seemed misogynistic.
If there’s a magic trick here, that must be it. Watch a guy fall all over himself being nice to a woman. She has no interest. He’s too easily caught. He must not be worth it. There’s no challenge, no excitement. But putting her down gets him closer to his objective?
I don’t exactly dismiss them…note the question mark. It’s a question to debate. What I really think is that a lot of PUAs figure that’s the case. And as I tried to imply, it’s a matter of degree. It’s all a game, you can’t help play a game, but some definitely push it farther than others. Hey, some parents root for their kids at Little League games but others get into fistfights.
Latka was a character on the sitcom Taxi as played by Andy Kaufmann. Latka was not having luck with women, and through studying Playboy and other “men’s” resources available at the time, transformed himself into a “player” named Vic Ferrari.
The “fake” character of Vic actually does better with women. This is a sendup of the idea that relationships are based on everyone “just being themselves.” Vic is a creation, but that creation is one where time has been taken on self improvement and making the social interactions of much higher quality. I’m not a woman, but if I was, I’d take Vic a thousand times over Latka. How is a woman demonstrating low self esteem by choosing Vic?
I have said this time and again, but relationships are fundamentally elemental and crass. If you want purity, be celibate. I have been celibate, and when I moved into relationships that was exactly how it felt, that I was entering an elemental existence where the purity of the individual experience no longer applied.
So you’re essentially arguing that it’s OK to use these tactics because it’s the victims’ fault for having such low self-esteem as to be susceptible to them?
You’re entirely missing the point of my comment; which is that there is no “code”.
People in singles bars are generally looking to get laid. It’s not the technique that’s successful, it’s the situation.
There isn’t. The only magic trick here is convincing you that there is one.
Are people put off by someone presenting as horribly insecure? Many are. Some are attracted.
Ah. So the whole thing is explicitly fictional.
What about just thinking you’re a jerk and hoping you leave her alone forever? These ideas presuppose that women are just as manipulative and utterly shallow as the men trying this shit out on them. I mean, some are, but all of them?
This is one hell of a sad belief. I can see why celibacy is appealing to you.
Not sad, just reality. Birth and death are crass as well. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I’m ignoring the shaming attempt.