Agreeing with @puzzlegal here. It’s not misogynistic to say that many women want to have sex and behaving like x may increase the chances that one or more may decide to have sex with you. It is misogynistic to say that women in general, considered as one chunk without any ability to have individual preferences, must be physically attracted to you if you behave like x. Let alone to say, or even imply, that they’ll have no choice but to act on it.
It’s misogynistic to consider women all as one hardwired lump, whether the issue is sex or isn’t sex.
If that argument made any sense, nobody would be selling homeopathic remedies.
People sell stuff that doesn’t work, all the time. Some of them make quite a bit of money at it.
And being treated like an automated-response thing does harm even to people who respond to it by walking away.
Nobody is saying that recommendations to brush teeth, trim beards, shower, and put on clean clothes that don’t look like rags, don’t have massively offputting sayings, and are reasonably appropriate for wherever one’s going are a problem. And nobody’s objecting to recommendations on how, in the particular culture, to carry on a conversation without coming off as being either creepy or essentially inept. You’d give all that advice, for that matter, to anybody applying for a job, whatever the genders of applicant and hiring person were. But if somebody’s telling you that doing that will trip some hardwired trigger in every woman’s brain and she’ll have to be attracted to you, she’ll have no choice; let alone that this will guarantee your getting laid – that’s a huge problem. Can you really not see the difference?
And in a very general sense, the main point at the start of that video clip is true. Both women and men tend to look at the judgements other people make, and give them weight in assessing a new person they meet. Do people i respect seem to like them? That’s a plus. Does the body language of the people near that guy, and their relative placement, suggest that other people find him attractive? That probably does make him look better.
But the idea that it’s a magic button that forces women (and only women, is implied) to find him sexy? That’s where it’s misogynistic.
I’m not sure if you realize that you are agreeing with me.
To follow your homeopathy analogy: homeopathy can use bullshit harmful marketing effectively promising cures, give a good show in person, marketing in person, and people will swear by it, passing on misinformation to others. PUA product providers can use use bullshit marketing promising to deliver magical manipulative mind tricks that will force women into sex, give a good show in person, and people will swear by it, passing misinformation on to others. Neither is actually delivering the promised product. Homeopathy is not curing and a PUA seminar is not creating people with knowledge of techniques that will [Jedi voice]This is the penis you’ve been looking for[/JV] women.
Now maybe someone marketing homeopathy can also convince someone to exercise moderately and eat a diet high in vegetables, fruits, other real foods, and low in added sugars. And maybe a PUA program can teach some generalizable basic social skills.
It’s sort of like Stone Soup.
The generalizable social skills at least we have someone stating clearly happened for him, and might have happened with some regularity.
I have stated clearly that any misogynistic packaging itself has harms. I’m somewhat surprised @Mijin did not see any.
Yes any magic button no choice packaging hyperbole falls into that. The actual advice that follows though? Not all of it completely crazy.
FWIW I think the same evolutionary psychology bits are used by women in pursuit of men, albeit packaged differently.
Yes, this is silly. But it’s my understanding that it goes both ways: that there exists similar advice for women on how to attract men. Here’s one example I found:
“Just use these wordless pickup tricks and any guy who is lucky enough to look your way will feel the sudden urge to come say hi.”
But what they are both delivering in many cases is that they convince people to use them and that they are working.
It doesn’t immediately become obvious to everybody that they’ve been sold nonsense. Many illnesses will be cured with passage of time, and some woman will agree to have sex with people using techniques that have a nonsensical basis, because many illnesses will go away on their own and some women will agree to have sex for other reasons: so many people will think that the remedies/techniques do work. Also some people can be convinced that if the remedy/technique doesn’t work, this must either be because they’re using it wrong, or because there’s something inherently wrong either with themselves or the person they’re using it on which overwhelms the supposed effectiveness of the technique.
So people die of treatable diseases because they relied on homeopathy to fix them. It happens. And it happens because they were convinced that homeopathy works; and because they’d been convinced by some of the people selling and otherwise recommending homeopathic remedies that modern medicine is suspect and shouldn’t be trusted.
And other people screw up their lives, and the lives of some of those they interact with, by believing that women are an all-alike category who must respond to certain triggers, and if they don’t something must be essentially wrong either with the women or with the people trying to use the triggers. They’re very likely to carry this attitude about women into all their interactions with women, sexual and otherwise. Some of the women will have their previous experience with and instruction about men reinforced, with the result that either they’ll put up with such treatment because they think it’s the only way to survive in the world or at least the only way to have any relationship whatsoever with men; others will only get massively and repeatedly annoyed. Some of the men will wind up in snarling frustrated isolation; some others will wind up in terrible relationships. All of this is bad for everybody of any gender who either is, or is friends/relatives with, or is raised by such people.
And every once in a while one of those men will start shooting.
My guess is that @Mijin took some other sort of course entirely, years ago, that was quite unlike what the term “PUA” eventually came to mean. That at any rate is how I read this part of post #353:
I wouldn’t be surprised. May well be equally toxic, with the exception that women are on average less likely to start shooting. Teaching women that men are all a hardwired lump with no choice in their responses unfortunately does also happen – some women even get this from their mothers, and there’s certainly magazines etc. trying to make sales by pushing the idea; but that doesn’t make it any better.
Act like you are hot shit and pretend as if other women are interested in you? Try to make her laugh? Don’t overstay your welcome? Have conversation starters be they canned lines or props?
Do they advise actual lying about your identity? Okay “negging” seems bad. But those who have been in the programs tell us it is rarely done and honestly it doesn’t seem that much more nefarious than insincere flattery … which lots do without any program.
Yes. Agreed harm can result from the marketing and also from mutually validating toxic mindsets in groups of similarly frustrated individuals who resent what they feel is the unfair hand they have been dealt.
The potentially violent crazies who have been of the program are however I think attracted to it, not caused by it. These programs succeeded because there was a demand, a market of men who thought that way and to whom the pitch appealed. It did not create the demand.
Stating general trends where certain gestures, behaviors, etc indicate interest or evoke attraction in the opposite sex isn’t misogynistic IMHO. Is it misogynistic to say “women like a man who stands up straight and looks them in the eye rather than slouches and stares at the floor”? Maybe if taken to an extreme like “standing straight and looking a woman in the eye triggers her lady-boner because of how Homo Erectus evolved.”
PUA is misogynistic because it objectifies women, it fosters an attitude of “collecting” women, it’s very confrontational, and ultimately treats women as if they serve no other purpose than to gratify men’s desires.
Either gender is allowed to objectify the other. Women constantly do this as well. It is allowed. If you don’t want to be objectified, don’t engage in one night stands. Consensual one night stands are the responsibility of both parties. Some woman sleeping with a man she met two hours ago who claims to be a professional football player, that’s objectifying whether he’s lying or not. If either gender doesn’t like it, they need to do a better job of vetting their potential partners before just hopping into bed.
Pretty sure there have been plenty of examples in this thread. Not just specifically regarding “negs” but “show disinterest”, “focus on every girl but her”, “make her seek your approval”. The fact that you only do it to a “ten” because a lower grade female (misogynistic to numerically score women by the way) probably already has insecurities and you might make her feel insulted.
These are very much sales techniques used to make a customer second guess themselves and turn to your “superior” product. “Why is this dork not talking to me? Am I not as hot as I think? Are my tits really too big and my legs too long for this club? I better have sex with him just to make sure.”
As I thought: it’s your characterization / understanding of the techniques, not anything anyone in the community said.
I have said repeatedly in this thread that I accept that some of the PUA movement may have been objectifying, even if I didn’t experience it personally.
But “wearing down her confidence” pinged my BS meter.
FTR no, I don’t think advice like “talk to other people first” equates on any level to trying to make someone less confident.
I suppose I can’t fault anyone for “just wanting to get laid”.
Maybe you are correct and teaching some basic PUA technique might curb more aggressive misogynistic behavior. I’ve always done ok with the ladies, but what I have noticed is a lot of men often turn into raging a-holes when it becomes clear they aren’t getting any that night. They start cock-blocking, picking fights, get super drunk, or otherwise just acting like annoying jerks.
I mean, to illustrate, note that this is a social technique I use generally.
If I’m introduced to a group of people, it’s often in a context where a particular person already has some significance to me – let’s say it’s the boss just as an example.
I could directly speak to him/her but I am aware that that’s often the person many people are fighting for attention from. So I can fit in better in the group, and set a more positive impression to all, if I talk to other people first.
Am I trying to “wear down the boss’ confidence?” No.
Individually, even collectively PUA techniques don’t have to have a negative connotation. As I and others have said, many of them are borrowed from public speaking, sales, stage, Dale Carnegie style books, etc. IIRC, Mystery was some sort of stage magician in a prior career or something.
But you said so yourself that the PUA attracted the wrong sort. That’s going to happen if you advertise having the secret to “getting as much ass as possible”.
It’s kind of like when I was in my 20s. We used to joke around that there is not bar or club with 87% hot women because as soon as Brooklyn found out about a place, it would be inundated with dudes until it became a sausage-fest. New Jersey, Staten Island or Long Island or any other place really could stand in for Brooklyn, but our friend was from Bay Ridge and he always used made up bullshit stats to convince us to go to random out of the way bars and clubs.
The point being is if you advertise there are hot sexy women to be had, you are going to attract every a-hole who wants to get laid. Same holds true with PUA movements as it does with bars and nightclubs.
That reminds me: In the 1940s and 50s George Antheil (who with Hedy Lamarr invented frequency hopping) wrote a magazine column:
Antheil wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper relationship advice column, as well as regular columns in magazines such as Esquire and Coronet . He considered himself an expert on female endocrinology, and wrote a series of articles about how to determine the availability of women based on glandular effects on their appearance, with titles such as “The Glandbook for the Questing Male”.[