Monday, March 07, 2011

PUA's

Dr. Helen has a link commenting on PUA's - that is "pick up artists." Get used to the acronyms if you choose to read up on this. Either some few with a strong founder effect on the phenomenon of game likes thinking in abbreviations, or this male type in general likes it. The longer article is here is you want to skip directly to that.

The concept is that women's sexual responses can be hacked, using their evolutionary hardwiring against them to seduce them. An idea rather frightening even if only partly true. There is apparently a lot of interest by proponents of what they call game in more academic discussions of what it all means in understanding male-female relationships in general, the future of the human race if knowledge of game becomes more widespread, whether the techniques discussed have wider application for leadership and politics, and, I imagine, a dozen other related items. One reads all this with a sort of horrified fascination.

I don't know the history of this - I recall reading in college that Balzac had claimed that any man could seduce any woman if he would only listen long enough - though I have little doubt that there is much discussion of natural game versus game as an intentional manipulation if one wanted to search for it. And certainly some of the more basic points have been long observed. For example, that women say they want sensitive caring men but go to bed with bad boys has been noted by most high school males. The traditional counters to this, that this only applies to a subset of women and is most prominent in younger women, are acknowledged by some proponents and emphatically denied by others. Questions of what the PUA's ultimately decide they really want in a relationship also take up much discussion space.

I should note that while this sounds like mere braggadocio and hopeful wishing on the part of some men, the proponents have actually amassed evidence that what they claim is in fact true and observable, whether anyone wants it to be true or not. They would claim that it is the disbelief that is mere braggadocio and hopeful wishing on the part of women.

It's hardly surprising that this concept of manipulating others via the use of artificial techniques would emerge from discussions of seduction. But similar things have been claimed about the behavior of tyrannical political groups, cult religions, and sales techniques. Something of these more general applications did show up in Lewis's That Hideous Strength, sounding quite plausible in that context. It may be that we all can be hacked in many ways, and this is simply one aspect, attracting much energy and attention for obvious reasons.

I like to think I would not have used this in high school and college even if I had known. Yet I can't say that with any assurance.

I don't think it is wise to dismiss this as impossible simply because we can invent arguments why it shouldn't be true. That the wilder claims are unlikely doesn't mean that there's not something to it.

31 comments:

karrde said...

I'm uncertain whether there's a self-selection pattern at work. (That is, certain kind of women congregate to the kind of men who are natural, and these men then presume that they are dealing with the only kind of women that exist.)

My own personal experience is that on a few occasions (countable on a hand), a woman exhibited a high level of attraction for me.

None of those events happened before I gained a high level of self-confidence for that kind of situation. At the time, I didn't use the word self-confidence. But in retrospect, that is the best word for the attitude.

However, I haven't turned any of those attractions into a longer-term relationship (or even a quick fling). So I can't claim to know a heck of a lot on the subject.

jaed said...

There is something to it. But I think it's mostly a method of fooling women into mistaking other, darker qualities for strength, and concomitantly the men fooling themseves about that as well. (PUA techniques work better on immature or imperceptive women, and better in situations where the woman hasn't had much opportunity to evaluate the man, and I don't believe this is coincidental.)

I wrote a long comment about this on esr's blog, which I ended up not posting, but which boils down to a few points:

1. For good biological reasons, women are attracted to the combination of gentleness and strength.

2. It's easy to confuse strength with cruelty, and gentleness with weakness.

3. Therefore, men can get sex by being jerks. Women can at least temporarily take this as an expression of strength, and therefore be attracted.

4. However, it's a fraud and can only last so long. (The PUA technique of constant insults is designed to damage a woman's self-esteem, making her question her own judgment, and therefore will prolong the fraud. But eventually she'll figure it out.)

5. The techniques encourage men to turn themselves into nasty jerks, and to turn women into needy doormats, so not only do they not result in strong relationships - they actively damage the partners for future relationships.

6. No good will come of it.

Anna said...

The grand mac-daddy Game blog, Roissy in DC, has been around for a while. I confess that when I first found it via Small Dead Animals, I spent way too many hours reading way too much of it with a mixture of feelings, mostly a weird fascination. The author is very smart and perceptive, if immoral and gross.

I like that he (or they, multiple authors) are very un-PC in their observations of humanity, but what it really comes down to is that Roissy et al. are nothing but heathen hedonists, the kind that have been around since Adam & Eve.

I also get tired of the double standard, they do all they can to sleep with as many women as possible, and then call all women "sluts". For example, they very much look down on women who "ride the carousel" until their 30's and then want a Nice Man to marry them after 100+ sexual partners. They are themselves doing the very same thing.

The other thing I see is that a lot of married guys use Game advice in their marriages and report great success. I am thinking, great, anything to improve your marriage. However, who on earth would want to be married to a woman like that, seriously? Anyway I am doing all I can to not be one of Those Women, and theoretically this is what they all want (since they look down on all women who are like that) but I have my doubts that they even know what they want in women.

It is bizarre but an interesting read.

terri said...

I'm coming out of blog silence just to respond to this post!

I think both karrde and Anna touched on a couple of important points.

Being a PUA will not translate into a long term relationship for any of these men.

You can't be in a relationship with someone you despise enough to think that you have to manipulate that person into giving you the time of day. The whole thing starts off badly with a man thinking he is in control of the woman and that women are blind, easily manipulated sexual objects.

Of course, most PUA's don't seem to really care about a "relationship" anyway. They are just looking for sex. That isn't hard to come by in their crowd.

I had to laugh when I followed the link to the comment on Dr. Helen's blog. The idea that "beta" males can't get a woman and are doomed to masturbating to porn, unlike their PUA counterparts is simply ludicrous. Like there aren't many married men or men who are promiscuous looking at porn? Methinks the billion dollar internet porn industry is not surviving solely on these poor "beta" men.

I find the whole movement, commentary, and zeitgeist of these guys to be something akin to pseudo-educated, frat boy, non-religious, entitled jerks. There is a very specific demographic represented on those blogs and in their comment sections.

Morally and culturally bankrupt in just about every respect.

I think this is related to your "sub-species" post about sexual attraction. The kind of guys who think this way are interacting with the kind of women who respond to it. They form their entire view of women based on their limited exposure to the women who hang out at dance clubs and bars.

Those places do not represent the broad reality for either sex. Most people meet their significant others through work, church, school, at the gym, or through mutual friends, or through friends of their family. The kind of social network these PUA's are dealing in is very limited and disconnected from "normal" life.

Their "reality" is like an MTV reality show.

When I was younger and single, and all of my friends were also, and all of us were "good" Christian girls, we used to experience this weird phenomenon in which the most immoral, jerky, offensive kind of guys would hit on us. We discerned a couple of reason for this:

1. Many of them wanted to turn a good girl into a bad girl. This was the nefarious attraction.

2. Many of them sensed that we were "different" than the women they were used to dating.....and they liked it. In their minds, we were the kind of women you married and settled down with.

What they never understood is that the kind of men we were looking for didn't act and live like they did and so they would never make any progress with us and didn't really have any hope of settling down with our sub-species.

Der Hahn said...

Terri and Anna, I applaud that you are willing to 'walk the talk' in selecting romantic parters, but I think the point of ESR's post is a significant portion of women aren't doing that, and the ones that seem to be the most vocal about the inavailablity of 'good men' are the ones with the greatest disconnect between their expressed preferences and their romantic partners.

Dr. Helen has another post up that dovetails with the one AVI linked. She links and comments on an MSNBC interview of college age women complaining about the bad behavior of their 'boyfriends' which raised the question in my mind, what triggered your desire to date these self-centered boors in the first place?

terri said...

Der Hahn,

I still think this is a particular demographic...the description at Dr. Helen's has "frat-boy" written all over it.

Just as I will fight against any attempt to stereotype women, I am equally appalled by the assumption that most men are wannabe PUA's. It just isn't true.

I can think of dozens of "good men" from various ages and backgrounds.

And...those girls in the video...very young, very interested in status, very "snobby" in regards to the expectations that men must have the same educational and academic drives and organized interests that they do.

Working for/with your father doesn't make a man a "loser" or a "slacker".

I think this is the general confusion that young single people go through, trying to figure out what exactly it is that you are looking for in a mate and what is negotiable and what is non-negotiable.

These women will eventually find a man that they approve of...and there will probably be an adjustment in their youthful naivete and expectations. The problem is that the men they are looking for aren't in their limited social circles right now. They need to broaden their horizons instead of expecting to trip over a "good man" on the way to Economics class.

(another) Jonathan said...

I think there is validity in some of the "game" analysis. Roissy is particularly thoughtful and perceptive.

I wouldn't be surprised if the mainstreaming of discussion about "game" improves the analysis. Much of what one reads on this topic by "PUA" bloggers appears to be heavily colored by the idiosyncrasies of a few individuals such as Roissy.

Does "game" matter in the scheme of things? Part of the case for using "game" is an assertion that you (the mating male) will make a better long-term choice if you learn these techniques. This is an argument for optimization -- very American. It reminds me of online hobbyists who debate how to get the best technical image quality by buying the latest photo equipment, while ignoring the overwhelming artistic component of photography. In the language of PUA theory, many PUA acolytes come across as betas who don't have the confidence to follow their own lights.

Maybe PUA theory is best seen as a reaction to PC cant about male/female interchangeability and male deficiencies. As PC sows, so does it reap.

It also seems that the alpha/beta metaphor is inadequate. Humans aren't pack animals, though sometimes it can seem that way. Of course, the people doing the alpha/beta characterizing generally characterize themselves as alphas.

Anna said...

To add to my earlier comment, I do think that a lot of women ARE acting like the "sluts" that PUAs see everywhere and they don't think that there is anything wrong with their behavior. If there weren't so many of them, how do you explain the success of PUAs.

Also, there is a small difference in how some people define Game - some define it as picking up as many women as possible, and some define it more broadly as males acting confident.

The alpha/beta male dichotomy is inadequate, because most "alphas" define anyone who wants to get married and have kids as "beta" even if they are a confident male.

In tangent, as I have posted here before, I really wish someone would start a fad that confronts women about their horrible behavior instead of always telling women that they are perfect little snowflakes.

Anna said...

Here is a classic Roissy post - see what I mean about him being very smart, perceptive, unconventional, and yet immoral at the same time (my frame of reference is the Biblical model of sexuality here). He says stuff that no one else is saying, that explains a lot of his popularity.

I do still like to read the blog but I have to take it in small doses because a) I can't take that much raunch, b) his nihilistic outlook on life depresses me.

http://roissy.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/the-biggest-misogynists-are-other-women/

Assistant Village Idiot said...

terri, I somewhat agree, though I think you overestimate how many will learn and outgrow. I'm not hopeful on that score these days.

And I agree about the turning good girls into bad girls part. I think it is a powerful driver with some men.

I remain particularly interested in what it means for both tyrannical and electoral politics. Some tyrants bedded an unending stream of women, some were near-monastic. Even aside from the Lewinsky scandal, discussion of sexual attractiveness was always part of the discussion of Clinton's popularity with women.

terri said...

Anna,

I certainly don't think that women are perfect little snowflakes...I don't think anyone is a perfect little snowflake.

I don't think the PUA concept has anything to do with inherent gender differences. I think it is a concept based and executed in immaturity.

WHy do some women go for bad guys? For the same reason that some guys go for bad girls. They aren't consciously thinking about the kind of person they are looking for, or about the kind of person that they, themselves, are...or about the consequences of their own actions and choices.

I really don't think this is a gender issue. This is a reflection of a society in which people don't have much self-awareness or foresight about where their choices will lead them....and never take the time to stop and think about what it is that they actually want and are looking for in life.

If a man or woman is looking for a particular type of mate, then they have to evaluate whether or not they are being the type of person who would attract the type of mate they want.

Women don't act horribly with their sexuality....people act horribly with their sexuality. There is an equal distribution in both genders of users and manipulators.

The dividing line isn't drawn male/female. It's drawn between impulsive/childlike irresponsibility with sexuality and grown-up/mature responsibility with sexuality.

Cassandra said...

I really don't think this is a gender issue. This is a reflection of a society in which people don't have much self-awareness or foresight about where their choices will lead them....and never take the time to stop and think about what it is that they actually want and are looking for in life...
If a man or woman is looking for a particular type of mate, then they have to evaluate whether or not they are being the type of person who would attract the type of mate they want.


Bingo! It doesn't surprise me one bit that women who display poor judgment in men tend to be the ones asking where all the good men are. Good men are all around them - it's just that some of these folks wouldn't recognize or appreciate a good man if he walked up and handed them a dozen roses :p

One sees men doing the same thing all the time - they employ faulty selection criteria (if you believe they want what they say they want), select bad apples, and then extrapolate from a biased sample of one to the rather silly conclusion that there must not be no good apples out there. After all, they didn't find what they weren't looking for! :)

FWIW, I haven't seen anyone arguing that PUA tactics *can't* work. Deception is effective enough of the time to be attractive to anyone untroubled by scruples or morality. The question is: will they work on the kind of person you say you're trying to attract?

There's nothing new about PUA tactics. Sites that teach women how to attract men emphasize the exact same principles: act confident, don't show desperation or seem too eager to please, keep initial encounters light and funny, cast your net wide so the inevitable failures don't loom larger than they should. Practice, practice, practice.

Not sure why that's so hard to teach without despising the opposite sex. That doesn't seem like a recipe for anything good.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Nice comment, Cassandra. Deception has indeed always been with us, and this is simply a more codified deception, perhaps. As to good choices, we may not be so attracted to the people who are good for us - it is called thinking from the waist down, usually.

Both strategies may have some evolutionary advantage, actually.

"I'm still trying to move this discussion to more general social expression and politics," he said, tapping his foot.

karrde said...

I think first that we need to be clear whether we are talking about something deep in the psyche of humans, or just another version of Our Culture Fails in a Different Way Now.

Is PUA a reprisal of tactics that were used before Western culture overlaid centuries of gentrification onto male/female relations?

I do seem to remember an Austen novel in which a charmer of a guy turned out to be an abuser. (He abused the trust of the women who fell for him, and convinced one to elope and skip the marry-on-the-run part.) Mr. Wickham may have seemed dashing and courageous to the Bennett girls, but I doubt he would be seen as a model by a modern PUA. I do note that one of his tricks was tell a hard-luck tale as a method of getting sympathy.

Wickham was also a military man, an officer of some sort. That might aid the 'strong man' image to give him a PUA edge, I think.

But still, I get the sense that PUA may be a part of that freer, franker, not-culturally limited world that the Sexual Revolution promised. Instead of navigating a pathway of relationship that is informed by centuries of tradition and experience, people were encouraged to say if it feels good, do it. The PUA's are blazing a new trail, one which usually ends in quick sex.

The religious people who didn't flow with the times now find this stuff shocking or strange.

But perhaps it is just the same old troubles of the way women and men relate, minus most of the signals that Western culture, informed by Christianity, traditionally inculcated into men and women.

On an unrelated tangent, how much of PUA is a finely-tuned sales job? Is it different in degree or kind from politics and PR? How much of political commentary is a hidden PUA/seduction for those who might agree, but need some convincing?

(another) Jonathan said...

I am not convinced by Cassandra's comment. My impression is that PUA theory and tactics are mainly a reaction to the poor socialization of many women. What many women want, as indicated by their nonverbal behavior, tends to contradict what they say they want, and they tend to abuse men who are interested in them. By contrast the men tend to be straightforward: they want either lots of sex, or to be able to attract women who are long-term-relationship material but might otherwise irrationally overlook them, or something in between. The PUA theorist might argue that "game" improves things for everyone by helping men and women to get what they really want. I suspect that's right, though I think there are also other ways to do it.

Der Hahn said...

AVI, my apologies for participating in the detour.

To bring this back to a more general level, my view is that PUAs are attempting to exploit a difference they perceive between women’s expressed and revealed preferences. That’s pretty much just a fact of being human. Most people know the importance of exercise and a healthy diet but we all wind up on the couch with a bowl of snacks anyway. It’s not a hard thing to find in the political field either, where people generally express a desire for governments to exercise fiscal restraint but object to specific spending or tax proposals.

With enough effort we can override our tendency for our actions to drift back to our baser impulses but anybody who has tried to follow a diet and/or exercise program knows that some backsliding is almost inevitable.

Retriever said...

As others have said, it isn't a choice between promiscuous PUAs and sensitive New Age guys. There are plenty of chivalrous and hot guys who don't jump into bed with everying female they find. And not all of them are pathetic betas either. Plenty of desirable men want to get married and have kids too.

But I freely admit to being clueless about all of this. I was never short of dates in my youth but I don't think I ever met a boy anywhere except at school, my church or doing volunteer work together. Never at a bar or disco or drunken party. I married a guy from a family my family had known a 100 years, and yes, thy fixed us up. My attitude was always that it's hard enough behaving in a loving way and not being a selfish jerk, so better to choose from the people with similar beliefs and values, with similar upbringing and education. It matters much more if a guy is kind to his mother than how he behaves trying to pick you up, because his true character is revealed by the former.

I should add that I was a dancer in youth and had plenty of men TRY to pick me up, but had no interest. Too old fashioned about relationships...

The Churchmouse

jaed said...

My impression is that PUA theory and tactics are mainly a reaction to the poor socialization of many women.

I'm not sure I would call it "poor socialization" so much as lack of self-knowledge: women are aware that they're attracted to masculine gentleness and say so, but they are often less aware of their attraction to masculine strength. Therefore they talk a lot about gentleness, and the men believe this is all that's needed, then become exasperated and desperate when they realize that being nice somehow isn't enough.

(Thus, the PUA, who makes use of camoflage, using nastiness and feigned indifference to mimic the strength that women are looking for. The PUA's use of camoflage imitations of desired traits is biologically interesting, now that I think about it. One can think of all sorts of analogical situations - flowers pretending to be insects ripe for mating, for example.)

For men to lie to naive or silly women about themselves in order to gain entry to their pants is nothing new; I don't think it represents progress in hacking people's evolutionary hardwiring, any more than serenading a woman to show her your (illusory) softer side was in 1593. For that matter, any woman who's ever worn lipstick has hacked men's hardwiring.

For me, the interesting question politically is why women - particularly young women - are not as aware of their need for strength as of their need for gentleness, or at any rate don't talk about the first nearly as much. It seems to me this is a relatively new development, as is the frustration of the SNAGs who try to provide what women say they want and find themselves in the dreaded friend zone.

I think this is where there's a genuine causative relationship between feminism and the PUA movement, because if everyone is now confused about the relationship between strength and cruelty, feminism became confused about this early on.

And so perhaps we're back to politics: feminism in its second-wave incarnation carried with it this idea that male strength is dangerous, and so it's not socially acceptable to acknowledge one's desire for it.

Cassandra said...

By contrast the men tend to be straightforward: they want either lots of sex, or to be able to attract women who are long-term-relationship material but might otherwise irrationally overlook them, or something in between.

I am not convinced by Jonathan's comment :p Let's see if I have this straight:

Men who just want lots of sex are generally (unlike women) straightforward. This is why the well known pick up line, "Hey baby - I want to shag you tonight but have no interest in getting to know you as a person" has been so spectacularly successful throughout the ages.

Men who want a long term relationship *want* to be straightforward with potential partners, but are forced [oh, the humanity!] to play manipulative mind games because absent some kind of subterfuge, the women they want irrationally refuse to return their interest!

The nerve of some people....

Of course it isn't at all "irrational" for these men to pursue women who aren't interested in them. In a "rational" world, these women would want them, too.

Aye yay yay. Sounds like a lot of "rationalization" to me.

Cassandra said...

It seems to me this is a relatively new development, as is the frustration of the SNAGs who try to provide what women say they want and find themselves in the dreaded friend zone.

While I agree with most of what jaed's comment, I think this "friend zone" stuff is really off base.

Attraction is a complex phenomenon. When I was dating, I had any number of male friends who I liked and admired but would never have been romantically interested in under any circumstances. Why is that? Because they were "betas" or because they were too nice?

No. The truth is brutal: in most cases there was nothing wrong with this guys at all except that for whatever reason, there just was no (or maybe just too little) physical attraction. You know, chemistry.

That's what is required to slide most of us over from "just friends" to "I want to be your love slave and bear your children". Nothing these guys could have done would have changed that. And believe me, some of them tried.

I didn't despise them, dislike them, look down upon them or anything else. The cold, hard fact was that there was just no spark. I liked them enormously - just not "that way".

Attraction isn't binary. It exists along a spectrum that runs all the way from "Not in a million years" to "Perhaps under the right circumstances but I don't feel Roman Candles shooting out of my nose every time he walks by". In the latter case, PUA might nudge a woman over into the interested category but the truth is that she was almost there anyway. If someone is already somewhat interested, it doesn't take much.

When I met my husband, the thing that most impressed me about him was that he was gentle, thoughtful and extremely considerate. IOW, a "nice guy". I was also physically attracted to him. And yes, I sensed strength in him. Had he acted like an arrogant (or "cocky", and boy is that a Freudian term) jerk or a player or not seemed interested in a committed relationship, I wouldn't have given him a second glance because that kind of guy is a bad relationship bet. It was his niceness, added to the already existing physical attraction, that sealed the deal. It made him stand out from the crowd.

Guys are great systemizers. What I see with the PUA genre is an attempt to reduce a complex situation to a one dimensional model that works just often enough to provide some positive feedback. And there's a lot of telling guys what they want to hear (women are rejecting you b/c they're irrational but you can control them using the right techniques - it's like pushing a button!).

Teaching men that women are irrational creatures who can be controlled/manipulated into giving you what you want (and then telling yourself that you're just "helping" them uncover their secret desires, which just "happen" to match yours) is morally problematic - it encourages the worst part of both men and women at the expense of our better qualities.

As many of the men on this thread have pointed out, we all have weaknesses that can be exploited, but exploitation/manipulation make a poor foundation for a relationship.

terri said...

I <3 Cassandra! ;-)

You have voiced many of the same thoughts that I have had hen reading this thread.

More than anything, the PUA's act as if they are entitled to sex from any woman they happen to be moderately attracted to.

Damn it! Women owe them some sex and fun in the sack! How dare they not proffer it immediately!

Never mind the fact that the "women" that these men keep referring to are of a very specific stripe...young, good-looking, sexually responsive.

If you read the comments on this from pro-PUA guys it doesn't take long when the women start being evaluated for attractiveness...and comments about being fat, or letting themselves go...or putting no effort into looking good....well, those start to bubble up to the surface. Because, you see, it isn't that these men want sex from women, in general, and are being refused....it's that they want sex from a very specific subset of women and they are being refused.

Anyone who wants sex can go bar-hopping and find someone who's willing to give it up for the night. The problem is that these men don't want sex from just anyone.

There's this weird phenomenon in which some men feel entitled to have very attractive partners....even if they themselves are only so-so looking.

On the other hand women, in general, are much more likely to date someone who isn't at the higher end of the attractiveness spectrum.

This is why it isn't unusual to see incredibly attractive women with "meh"-looking guys.

How often do you find an incredibly attractive man with a "meh"-looking woman?

Hardly ever.

The fact that most people populating the globe are average-looking, with maybe a few particular features that can be accentuated to make them stand out from the crowd, seems to escape these PUA's.

That's my little rant for right now!

As far as social use of this or any other psychological method...it will only work in small numbers. If this technique becomes so widespread...it will soon lose its effectiveness, if it really ever had any. Humans adapt and change and once they know the ways in which they are being played, they will adjust accordingly.

Anonymous said...

I think it is easy to this act or anyone who would admit to this. But what are we really talking about? Arguably what a PUA is; is someone who gives women what they want and in turn the woman gives the man what he wants. I do suspect then that there are in fact more women who practice this gentle art then men. In fact most men are dragged into romance away from their cars, sports, fishing, jobs and carousing. And how are they dragged into romance??? Why the woman becomes a PUA of course.

After 23 years in my second marriage I am still a PUA and spoil my wife and love her very much. It is hard to imagine that this is a bad thing...

Anonymous said...

P.S. the "who she wanted me to be" I referred to is also somebody I very much prefer being anyhow: Calmer, more confident, more responsible, more in charge of the situation.

If you're a better man, women will like you better. You'll like yourself better.

I had a big problem at first admitting to myself that I needed work. It was difficult to admit the relationship was failing due to my own shortcomings.

Anonymous said...

Oops, looks like my initial comment went away. Whatever. Have a nice day.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I didn't erase your comment, anon.

jaed said...

I did get what I suspect is anon's longer initial comment, via email. If Anonymous comes back and would like it posted but doesn't have a copy of his own, I guess I can repost it.

Anon, the most likely explanation for a completely disappeared comment is a Blogger malfunction. On Blogspot sites, the blogger can remove the text of a comment, but the original datestamp and poster name remain in the thread, with a note: "Removed by an administrator." So far as I know, there is no way for a blogger using Blogspot to completely remove a posted comment with no trace.

jaed said...

Aaaand I just got email notice of a followup comment from Anonymous, which I see Blogger has eaten. Sigh.

I shall repost both comments for the sake of fairness, and let's hope Blogger doesn't eat them too. AVI, hope that's OK.

jaed said...

[reposting for Anonymous]:

A.V.I., It never appeared, as far as I saw, so I was hoping it had just gotten caught in a spam filter. There were two links in it, so maybe that triggered something. Guess I just screwed it up myself somehow. Bummer. If you think it's worth reposting, please do. I didn't save a copy of my own.

It wasn't exactly a literary masterpiece, and while it was accurate as far as it went, I realized later that never addressed people's objections to game, because I was writing about only the subset of game that interests me, which is 90% or more of what Roissy writes about. I don't read any game writers other than Roissy because the others are illiterate and they tend to focus on the technical minutiae of meeting annoying women in loud nightclubs in large cities. BORRR-INGGG!!!

So, yes: What most people see of game is a bunch of guys with an asperger's-level focus on planned conversational set-pieces and silly stunts like palm-reading, all directed towards making a really strong first impression on bony, upwardly-mobile urban bottle blondes with brushed-stainless Sub-Zero refrigerators in their chic kitchens -- and the fridge is empty aside from a bottle of hot sauce, two half-eaten take-out salads, and a bottle of overpriced vodka. And then the top practitioners start charging for seminars and bootcamps.

That's only one thing you can do with the fundamental insights Roissy writes about, but it's the lurid, gold-chained, Tarzan-yodeling public face of the whole "game" world. If that scene makes your hair stand on end, I can't argue. Along with the vulgarity, the asperger's aspect of it seems to bug people, too: The notion of turning human relations into a systematic algorithm. But hey guess what, for those of us WITH asperger's, that's how we learn things. All social skills are learned (and therefore "artificial" and "manipulative"), early or late, easily or painfully. There's something about nerdy guys learning social skills that seems to creep some people out. Like we should "know our place" or something and stay nerdy. I mean, jeez, whatever.

Anyhow, you don't object to chemistry just because some knucklehead invented poison gas. I have found that some of "game's" essential insights about relations between the sexes have real value, and are no more manipulative or dishonest than giving her roses on your anniversary. If you know what kind of man women want, it is not manipulative to be that kind of man -- unless you're promising something you don't intend to deliver. What's ugly about the "game" culture as a whole is the part where some of these guys do just that.

Actually screw the original post, this one says the same thing better. "More gooder", sorry.

jaed said...

Well, that was odd. I tried reposting the first comment (sans links) as an anonymous commenter, and saw the comment when I reloaded the page a couple of minutes later, but a few minutes after that it was gone. The second one, which I posted under my login, still seems to be there.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

"...technical minutiae of meeting annoying women in loud nightclubs in large cities..."

Great line, anon. glad we got the comments all in.

Anonymous said...

Your articles don’t beat around the bushes exact t to the point.pandoras box system