Or those memoirs by that James Newhouse guy.
I would think that “friend zone” being mentioned on Friends was the thing that made it well-known. Which was a long time before PUA.
That’s certainly the way it has been depicted in the years since.
As I say, the events I went to were mixed gender and sexual orientation, and largely about conversation skills. But still referencing many of the concepts mentioned in this thread.
And, of course, the only women important enough to be subject to their conversations were “10s” or others considered suitably attractive in their narrow points of view to count.
I think this is an important element to the mindset of these kinds of people. They are obsessed with suitably “hot” women and the choices they should or should not make. Remember Elliott Rodger? I think I recall that he ranted about how women shouldn’t be allowed to have any free will and should be enslaved to the service of men like him.
There is actually something in our mass media that teaches that only certain kinds of women matter and that the hero of the story will get a woman like that in the end.
White supremacists obsess about this kind of thing too, that “hot” white women should be taught that their duty is to bear white children (fathered by themselves in their minds, of course) regardless of what their own opinions might be regarding how to live their lives.
Are workplace romances and “formal” occasions with “managed relations” really the only feasible alternatives to online dating between strangers?
ISTM that life should include other IRL alternatives such as community activities, volunteering, etc., that bring together groups of people of diverse ages, relationship status, etc. That way people can get to know people they might be interested in dating, but in a context that isn’t specifically about dating, and where there are disincentives to harass or mistreat possible dates (because you’ll incur disapproval from your community if you do).
I realize that this would require some social pushback against the ongoing trend toward commodification and commercialization of social activities, including dating. Which may not be very realistic.
Indeed, I met my wife at a charity function. She was a volunteer and I was a financial supporter.
I don’t think we need to be focusing on the rantings of insane fringe people.
But there is bit of a “winner take all” phenomenon (no doubt fed by mass media) where people tend to focus on the most attractive and ignore everyone else. I remember in college, a girl I was friends with (who was not unattractive, but not a “10”) commented about how all the guys complained about never getting laid, but also only seemed preoccupied with a handful of the “most desirable girl in school” types. Then again, women do this as well.
That may be just human nature and thus serves as a useful tool to recruit violent losers to your cause.
Work is a convenient place to meet a partner because, like school, it is a structured environment where you can get some background about a potential mate and actually get to know them before deciding to pursue a relationship. Plus people spend most of their waking hours there.
If you don’t have other formal structured activities (like synagogue or a kickball league or something), then I think you are kind of stuck with the other end of the spectrum - unmanaged “meat market” free-for-alls, whether virtual or real world where people are just looking for immediate (usually drunken) hook-ups with strangers they just met based on superficial first impressions.
No one wants to tell the story of how I met your mother at 2 for 1 tequila shots night.
I’m not at all convinced that women changed, at least not in the time frame we’re talking about. I think the real changes were decades before, with the women’s lib/feminist movement that shifted a lot of power into women’s hands as far as if they dated, who they dated, when they dated, if they married, when they married, etc…
Combine that with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and you ended up with a lot of men who before that, would have ended up paired off with some woman because that’s what was done back then.
But after that, they were both unmarried AND not getting laid. So there was more than likely a whole decade or two worth of men who were desperate, but only stuck with what their buddies/families/communities had to say, which was likely mostly out-of-date, and didn’t work.
So at some point, I feel like that crowd of desperate men split- one part went into “self betterment” and along the PUA train of thought, where they’d “improve” themselves to get laid, and the other part fell into blaming women for their desperation, and that’s where the Incels came from as a movement.
Neither would have really been possible without the internet to connect them and offer a mechanism for community/information transfer though. So some dude in that situation in 1989 would have suffered in silence, while in 1999 he could have been part of several online communities to validate his feelings, help him, etc… (or whatever; not sure much was actually helpful to anyone).
I think the rules for most of these places, one I think works well, is you are allowed to make one overture. If that is turned down, it can be harassment. (Presuming the one overture isn’t overly lewd or something like that.) I think that’s a fair and balanced rule.
Now believe it or not, there are still women who say they liked to be pursued, who will automatically turn down any first offer for a date because they want the men to be more persistent. I am just going by what I have read. So that approach would be less likely, though I suppose those women won’t be launching harassment complaints anyway if a man decides to ignore that rule. There are also going to be other people that are offended by a single ask. In those cases the complaint should not be valid, but it still tends to cause problems and embarrassment for the person who asked.
The situation with the Meetup group I mentioned is probably due to the lack of resources involved in something like Meetup. Someone complains, we can’t really do anything so we’ll slap on this rule even though Meetup is social and many of the people there are likely open to relationships.
You mean like the overture to Der Rosenkavalier?
Some of the PUAs actually were in relationships at one point, and got cheated on or went through a bad breakup or one they couldn’t understand. So they no longer understand the dating world and do the short term strategies as a defense mechanism. Some of these guys are quite good at getting what they want in this way, though they typically tire of it at some point.
My opinion is that women are more easily dissatisfied with LTRs and initiate breakups that men can’t understand. I probably understand at this point why my LTRs ended but it’s not an easy thing to live through.
The men that initiate breakups are easier to understand for me, from a man’s perspective. They’re either committmentphobes, or they are philanderers. These guys have an act down and it seems to work, because they also seem to find more women to take them on. This can be frustrating from the relationship oriented man’s perspective, since it seems like acting fake and saying things you don’t mean work with women. And they do work… provided you’ve got the skills to pull them off.
I’d be willing to bet that the percentage of PUA types that were in long term relationships/have serious experience with women is very small.
I’m sure there are some, but I doubt they’re a significant number relative to the number of guys who just had no luck/ability whatsoever.
I experienced that around age 30. A mutual acquaintance told me that a woman was hoping I’d ask her out. I would have hoped she’d just ask me herself, but I went ahead and asked. She said, “I don’t know”, so I figured that was that. When our acquaintance asked me if I’d approached her yet, I told him what had happened. Then I hear, “she wants to be pursued.” That did it for me. The next weekend I met the future Ms. P, and that really was that.
Speaking strictly from experience, I’d say insecure men can’t understand. Kind of a “what did I do wrong this time” thing.
Gonna disagree. For that matter, plenty of people of either gender may opt at some point for “short term dating” for a period or perhaps that’s their new lifestyle. It is not that unusual after a relationship, depending how the relationship ended and how the person processed it.
The PUAs that are starting from dating Ground Zero likely don’t have the skills to be very effective. The more effective PUAs have some prior experience.
I am also going to push back on comments about insecurity. Plenty of people are good people and may lack the confidence or skills to easily attract partners. Even if they believe in themselves, it doesn’t always translate to widespread physical attraction. Others have the ability to attract partners as seemingly their only skill. Again, that can be either gendered. A lot of relationship stuff isn’t terribly moral.
I would take that bet. The techniques and advice did help most people I saw.
Look at it this way: even if PUA is all just manipulative and cynical tricks (which it isn’t, IME, but no-one wants to hear what I am saying) it can still be beneficial to have gone through it. If it pushes you to just get out there and not immediately make excuses to stop trying that’s already a massive help.
Think of it a bit like improv.
Is most improv absolutely cringe and a war crime to the eyes and ears? Yes*. And yet, it can still be a positive thing to a person’s self confidence, ability to handle pressure etc to do an improv class.
* In fairness, some of the most I’ve ever laughed has been watching improv. But bad improv is a tough watch.
I don’t see how this in any way contradicts what I said. I didn’t claim that “women changed” in any essential way, rather that the societal expectations for women and women’s own behavior changed.
Yes, I agree that those changes were initiated in the “women’s lib” era of the 1970s and thereabouts; that’s why I opined that the PUA phenomenon was a response to those changes.
That sounds pretty much like what I originally said back in post #143:
In a nutshell: as individual women (or at least some of them) became more capable and independent, some men relatively lost out; some fraction of the the easy / guaranteed pickin’s suddenly weren’t there to be had. So they freaked.
IIRC, what changed was not so much women’s actual capability for autonomy, but the perceived necessity of being in a relationship.
I remember up through my 30s there was a very strong expectation, even among very independent feminist-minded people, that pretty much everybody would be either in a relationship or trying to be in one, or exceptionally might have some specific reason for not being in one. ISTM that the whole concept is considered much more “optional” for young people these days. (Not that there isn’t still quite a bit of “pairing pressure”, but it’s nowhere near what it was AFAICT.)
What I don’t get is why so many guys (though as noted, maybe this is just way exaggerated by the media) are complaining about this shift. We were always being told (although sometimes subliminally) that guys in general HATED being expected to date girls, or get married, or partner girls at dances, or basically be subjected to any obligation to form one half of an opposite-sex couple of any kind in order to enable “normal” social life that was firmly entrenched in a “couples” model.
WE were supposed to be the ones who wanted a guy to fuss over and bake for and listen to admiringly and get flowers and presents and compliments from and show off as our trophy of having “snagged a man” and all that ish. Guys were supposedly reluctant participants motivated mostly by a sense of social obligation and/or hopes of nookie, or once in a while succumbing to True Love, but they definitely had to be coaxed.
And now nobody has to do any of this if they don’t want to, and they’re not necessarily even considered weird or hopeless losers if they don’t! Why aren’t guys more glad about this? Were all y’all just playing hard to get all this time? (Yeah, I know that’s a somewhat overgeneralized and not-totally-serious portrayal of the situation, but honestly, the whole PUA/incel phenomenon does kind of baffle me in that respect. I expected a lot more guys to be saying on some level “I DON’T have to have a girlfriend if I don’t want to? Great!!”)
Well, first off, this largely isn’t true. Sure, there’s less expectation that someone is in a relationship at any given time. But a guy who is a virgin is still definitely regarded negatively, especially after a certain age. The only real exception is if the man in question identifies as asexual. But most guys don’t: they have the pairing drive.
And the idea that men don’t want relationships was a huge exaggeration. The issue was just that men seemed to put a higher importance on sex, and a lower level of importance on the emotional part of relationships. Boys and men would still want to have girlfriends, and most would want to get married at some point, even if they wanted to “sew their wild oats.” They just often didn’t like the sappy stuff or the overly romantic stuff. And men tended to be really bad at communicating their emotions or letting themselves become vulnerable.
And even if he wasn’t into all of that, there’s still an obvious advantage of a relationship. If you like sex, it’s good to have a partner who wants to have sex with you. Hence why men would act like getting married was a bad thing, as the stereotype was that wives would stop wanting to have sex once they had their relationship.
And, finally, even PUAs and incels aren’t going to say “I don’t have to have a girlfriend” if that means they also don’t get to have sex. And, no, having sex with a prostitute, who you have to pay to do it, doesn’t work, because the whole point of wanting sex is to feel like you are sexually desirable, and to be able to give pleasure someone else.
They’re still seen as “losers” who can’t actually get any woman to like them enough to want to have sex with them, let alone be in any sort of ongoing relationship.