What do you mean by “the purity of the individual experience”?
Relationships require compromise; especially if the partners are going to live together, which is going to require compromise about a whole lot of things right down to who’s going to clean the toilets. Is that what you’re thinking of as “elemental and crass”?
If you decide to live a celibate lifestyle, like a monk for example, it seems probable that your top priority is contemplative. Thinking about yourself and morality and God and the universe, however you want to approach those topics. You can be an atheist, it doesn’t matter, but it’s all about the state of your mind.
Relationships involve having sex and creating offspring through combining DNA. Something that every living thing on the planet does.
Not everyone who is celibate, whether by choice or by happenstance, is living like a monk because they want to contemplate themselves and morality. And quite a lot of people who do want to contemplate themsalves and morality and God and the universe are in relationships.
Not every living individual on the planet, no. Not even every species, actually.
And certainly not all human relationships. Even all the ones involving sex don’t necessarily involve creating offspring.
And I still don’t know what you mean by “the purity of the individual experience”; unless maybe what you mean is “living like a monk” (though I think most monks live communally.)
No, but the drive to create offspring is what creates the interest in non-procreative sex.
At its root it is a biological function. Same as others. Feeling and many other things may be developed and spring from that, but it’s always going to be a biological function.
lobotomyboy63 also seems to have missed the point of the episode. “Vic” may be more successful at dating, but Vic is a horrible person that absolutely no one wants to be around. That episode is certainly not an argument in favor of changing your personality in order to be successful with women, unless “successful” is defined as “meaningless one night stands after which you refuse to talk to the woman again.”
I think for some who haven’t experienced a healthy relationship, it can be difficult to comprehend.
To respond more generally to the assertions about PUA techniques “working,” I will concede that is at least partly true, at least for a sufficiently liberal definition of “working.”
Some of the scams “work” on vulnerable people in the way many confidence games do. That is, they trick/pressure/manipulate naive or desperate people into going along with things they don’t want to do, or wouldn’t want to do if they fully understood what was happening. This is not something to be proud of, or even something to let yourself or your friends off the hook for because you think it’s the victims’ fault for letting themselves be taken advantage of. But I guess if you’re just looking for a damp hole to stick your dick into and can’t see the humanity of the person attached to that hole, you’ll fail to see the problem.
Some of the scams “work” in the way that, say, medicinal leeches work. In the middle ages, western folk believed in four bodily humors, the imbalance of which caused illness, which could be corrected by applying leeches to suck out the excess blood. This was, of course, about as dumb as flirting with the friend of the girl you’re interested in to get her to throw herself at you. But it turns out leeches do have some medical uses in limited situations (something about the anticoagulants in their saliva; I’m too lazy to look it up), and so not only are they occasionally used today by doctors who aren’t total quacks, it’s possible they actually legitimately helped once or twice when people were using them for the wrong reason. If you’re a boy who assumes the girl you’re interested in wants you to glom onto her and never let go, and a PUA coach teaches you a bunch of stupid rules like opening with a mild insult (instead of saying “hiI’mBobyou’rethemostbeautifulwomanI’veeverseenwillyoumarryme?”), walking away and ignoring her for a bit after introducing yourself (instead of trying to follow her into the bathroom), and waiting 3 days to call (instead of leaving a series of increasingly desperate voicemails culminating in a drunken crying fit while she’s working a 6-hour shift and can’t pick up the phone), then by God, those techniques might make you slightly less likely to squelch any interest she may have had in you based on your shared enjoyment of [whatever] and your [mildly appealing physical feature]. But if you persist in believing that the way to make a girl be interested in you is to follow some arbitrary script that treats her like a safe to be cracked, you will be disappointed over and over when you fail, and you won’t even achieve true intimacy and happiness when you “succeed.” And you will likely end up being the kind of person who thinks all relationships are adversarial, transactional, and inherently harmful.
Some of the scams “work” in the way that placebos work. If you lack the confidence to introduce yourself to someone you’re attracted to or ask them out on a date, and some sleazeball tells you to wear this magic shiny ring to dazzle her, and wearing this ring gives you the courage to go fucking talk to her, your chances rise from zero to at least something more than zero. That in itself isn’t such a bad thing, and I can see why shy or awkward young men would be grateful for the push even if they eventually figure out it was just a sugar pill. But you still have the dehumanization problem–the fact that you’ve gone from thinking “I can’t talk to that girl; she couldn’t possibly like me!” to thinking “I’m going to work my magic to make that girl talk to me, because my desires are what count and she is nothing but a system for me to manipulate!” Not in so many words, of course, but the point is that you gained the confidence not by building yourself up (“I’m a kind, funny guy with a nice smile, and she might like me, and if she doesn’t I still have value as a person and will find love someday!”) but rather by discounting her feelings and agency, which are the things that scared you. And that’s a problem.
Yeah, it’s been a really long time since I’ve seen that episode, but I remembered Vic as a creep that no one liked. IRL he’d be considered a creep and sleazy, too. Not a catch.
Not at all; I’m reporting what I read. IIRC “Mystery,” the teacher, was telling these guys how to be more successful with women.
He closely observed how people act with each other during the “courtship” of a relationship, and combining these observations with various theories of evolutionary psychology, he created a system of techniques and strategies designed to help men succeed with women in different social situations such as bars, clubs, cafes and similar places. He shared his theories in a discussion group on Usenet, alt.seduction.fast, and became famous for his analytical approach in the field of seduction and the “reports” he detailed.
You can question the ethics of it—I certainly do. Returning to the question, is all fair in love (and war)? He was young, dumb, and full of cum and might say, “I went from zero women to as many as I want…that’s all I care about.” Is it a case of caveat emptor or the ends not justifying the means or tit for tat or whether it’s individual choice or what? If you make one choice does he have to make the same choice?
I’ve met a few…many people think it’s always the other guy’s fault. All of it brings us down IMO.
While that’s true, I think there’s another angle. I’ve heard that the success of the con is proportionate to the greed of the mark. To illustrate, I heard about this doctor who got sucked into a scam and lost a bunch of money. He was a doctor, had money…but he was greedy. So it wasn’t against his will…it was just what he wanted to believe.
First, they showed him as Latka approaching a woman. This link asks you to confirm your age so I didn’t post it originally. Then he gets into reading Playboy to change himself and next time around, the girl accepts.
And that was the irony. The people who knew and loved Latka as a sweet foreign guy didn’t like the change. But he reinvented himself to attract women and women preferred that guy to Latka. I couldn’t find it but there was another segment where Alex (Judd Hirsch) said to him something like, “I was kind of on your side because I think some people here treat you condescendingly [as Latka] but you [Vic] I don’t even like.”
And that describes something else I concluded about the PUA thing…men can’t all be rich, funny, exciting, or whatever, but they can pretend to be. And if they can convince women of it, that’s a big step forward.
It’s a biological function which in quite a few other species, including those most closely related to us, also serves social functions.
Arguably, everything we do is a biological function; including contemplating the nature of the universe. That doesn’t, IMO, make everything “crass”.
From what I can gather from the celibate monks I know, there is nothing pure about being a monk focused on living a contemplative spiritual life, either. You bring your complicated crass self with you wherever you go and whatever you do. Monks just don’t try to escape themselves. At least not if they are going to stick with it.
“Women” as an entire monolithic category again. In this fictional setup were every one of the people who “knew and loved Latka as a sweet foreign guy” male?
(And if what they loved was specifically his foreignness: that’s another type of creepy.)
And, yet again: it’s fiction. You appear to be citing a fictional television show as if it were reality.
That’s how the script had it.
Actually I didn’t miss your point; I disagree with it. As I stated in a later post, how this method came to be:
He closely observed how people act with each other during the “courtship” of a relationship, and combining these observations with various theories of evolutionary psychology, he created a system of techniques and strategies designed to help men succeed with women in different social situations such as bars, clubs, cafes and similar places.
He’s claiming there’s a scientific basis. Let me go a step further.
According to Erik von Markovik, better known by his stage name Mystery, there is a systematic approach to attracting women. Mystery is a world-renowned “pick-up artist”, who has lectured on the arts of attraction and social dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has developed a highly structured formula to attracting women and is often paid thousands of dollars to share his expertise with those who attend his seminars.
Hmm, MIT? The newspaper caption says
Professional Pick-Up Artist Erik “Mystery” von Markovik describes his philosophy and methods for picking up women. By dividing the interaction into sub-categories of “attraction,” “comfort,” and “closing,” Mystery claims to execute a successful pick-up leading to a relationship in an average of seven hours. The talk, held in the Stata Center yesterday, was sponsored by the 2008 Class Council.
Nice try, can’t whoosh me!
Yes, the fictional character wasn’t gay. He wanted to attract lots of them.
No, but you’d have to click on a link to see that for yourself. I think all three links together were less than 10 minutes.
I thought it was a humorous take—as it turns out, there’s this type of humor that people feel is funny because they see some truth in it.
The title of this thread is : Why was the “pick up artist” movement so popular…
The title of this thread is not: “Why was the movement wrong” or “Why was it misogynistic” or “Defend the practices of the movement” or something along those lines. I’m trying to relate some facts and ideas without endorsing it or anything, but it isn’t taken that way.
The “truth” in it is that Vic is seen as a sleazy creep.
Of course he is. That doesn’t mean he’s right.
My bolding.
That’s hardly an official endorsement by MIT.
I’m not @MrAtoz; but I don’t think you understand what “whoosh” means.
What neutral authority is timing him; and defining “relationship” and following up to see if there is one; and counting what percentage of women snarl at him, turn away, laugh at him, throw their drinks at him, or string the scammer along for a while and then go off without him? Let alone comparing what he’s doing and what other people are doing, and their relative success rates?
WTF?
This has nothing to do with whether anyone, fictional or not, is gay. And I wasn’t pointing out that the fictional character was considering women as an entire monolithic category. I was pointing out that you are.
Quoting Oscar Wilde isn’t going to change the obvious fact that there are lots of entirely unrealistic things presented as fiction.
Do the stories we tell each other influence what actually happens? Of course they do. And people assuming that random television shows depict the way humans work influence the way people behave (though I very much doubt that example can be taken as a “beautiful form”.) But that most certainly doesn’t mean that because a technique is considered to magically get dates on TV means that it’s going to work any better than entirely different behavior in real life; or even that it’ll work at all. Because people on TV drive like crazy and get away with it does influence the occasional non-thinking person to drive like that – but that not only doesn’t make it not dangerous, it doesn’t make it the best way to get to the grocery store and back home.
Wow, what a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense. (With, to top it off, the apparent author of the article declaring somebody to be an “insufferable individual” based on not liking what they looked like.)
According to that, I must be attracted to a whole lot of people who I actually find repulsive.
Plus which: physical attraction, for many people, isn’t a choice. What one does about it most certainly is a choice. Presenting women as mindless zombies who must go home with you if you manage to look like you’ve got his list of four qualities is not only nonsense, it’s obnoxious nonsense.
You appear to be saying it was popular because it actually had a magic “code” that would make women, considered as some sort of bulk category, go to bed with the practitioner.
If you actually mean to say it was popular, to the extent that it was popular, because it managed to delude some men into believing this and to paying for the supposed magic codes, well, OK.
I selected this one thing to respond to.
I’m telling you that in this fictional work, the person is straight. He is looking for females. He would like to be attractive to various women he meets. If he were gay, he would be trying to attract various males he meets. Just a simple statement of fact according to the writers who produced the program.
You want to try to take that and twist it into some point of contention, try to make it about me, so we’re done. I could go point by point but you’ll figure a way to twist those as well, injecting things I didn’t say or imply, possibly based on your own history or something? I know because it has already happened…I never mentioned zombies, for instance.
You seem to have some weird hard-on for me; I don’t get it, but whatever. I just can’t even with you. I’m off to the how-to section to seek a setting to ignore all of your posts and please, feel free to do likewise with mine.
People who want to be car salesmen go to training courses to learn how to do that. People who want to be real estates sellers (i.e. agents) go to training courses to learn how to do that. People who wing it are either naturally good salespeople or they fail at it.
Selling is a skill. Whether you’re selling Cutco knives, Fords, or your own personality and appearance. There is no magic Jedi technique that will “close” every would-be buyer who enters your Ford dealership. But there absolutely are ways to greatly improve the number of such walk-ins who do convert to sales versus the naive / clueless / nervous approach.
Ideally all people of whichever gender would never resort to salesmanship and their natural qualities delivered naturally = naively would get them a) some date/mate, and b) some date/mate they feel good about having.
But that’s not what happens. Some people learn salesmanship naturally, others learn by diligent trial and error practice, others learn by courses & books and practice, and others either despair of ever learning, or decide the whole thing is a crooked con they want no part of. It takes all kinds to make a planet. There is nothing gendered about this paragraph.
There’s nothing inherently evil about taking training to be an effective salesperson for the most important cause in your life: your own happiness.
The aphorism about “all’s fair in love and war” carries two meanings:
It is a cynical aphorism. It suggests your target will play nasty, and so will the competition. You can play clean(er) and receive the scraps from the floor, or you can play like you mean it and get what you want. And yes, it does say clearly that the ends justify the means.
I’m not here to endorse this aphorism as a way of life, but I am here to say it has stood the test of time as an aphorism because it says something meaningful (and deeply unflattering) about human nature at scale.
IMO young hetero men exist on a continuum from those who want meaningful long term relationships to those who simply want no-strings sex. Young hetero women exist on the exact same continuum. But the distribution is very skew between them. Lots more men lean to the latter, lots more women lean to the former. They’re all horny, but in different ways for different things. We can wish it was otherwise all day long, but it’s not. It is the way it is.
Accommodating ourselves as individuals and as a society to that skew is an ongoing effort. Current Western society both reinforces this and also fights against it. The situation is very far from symmetrical. And very far from static.
I would think there are lots of people of all genders who want relationships, but in the mean time will settle for no strings sex (and I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing).
For what it’s worth, thorny_locust seems like the sane rational one saying the obvious sane rational things here. You appear to not comprehend what they said.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion but a discussion would turn into a hijack of the thread. I don’t have a problem with the way things stand. If you want to think I’m an asshole you go right ahead and do that.