A guy tried to PUA me once. Did the ridiculous "think of a time when you were very excited and filled with lust" thing, the touchy thing, the whole bit. I fucked another guy right in front of him.
(The other guy's opening line was "hi" followed by actual conversation, and he was both a sweet guy and a nice lay. I actually didn't mean to be in front of the PUA dude, this was later in the night and not direct revenge, but we were out of bedrooms and ended up on a couch in front of everyone because we didn't really care who saw us.)
There's no accounting for taste, eh? Guess you're not a very good hypnotic subject, either.
ReplyDeleteEvery female blogger's "That would never work on me" is taken as proof positive it would never "work 'on' anyone." Ideally, you're not "working on" someone, you're exploring a connection.
You're also reinforcing the "women choose, men are chosen" aspect of the PUA paradigm.
Ideally, you're not "working on" someone, you're exploring a connection.Well, exactly. That's what the sane guy and I did. But exploring a connection has absolutely nothing to do with calculated (and transparently so, you could see the gears going) and premeditated babble that clearly doesn't sound like normal conversation.
ReplyDeleteYou're also reinforcing the "women choose, men are chosen" aspect of the PUA paradigm.Women choose and men choose. There were men at the party who didn't approach me at all and men I approached who weren't interested. Perhaps I should have tried hynotizing them.
You know, I was given Mystery's book once, and I'd read others about relationships and "How To Succeed With Women"--i.e. get laid. I could write one, but it would not sell, as it would be one page. If you be yourself, and have a life, and some social skills, eventually you will find someone you're attracted to and have sex. This is no reassurance to a geeky teen with DSB, but it is very, very comforting later in life.
ReplyDeleteHrrmph. I never got invited to that kind of party.
ReplyDeleteEurosabra. Hypnosis does not work on an unwilling subject. Hypnosis. Does. Not. Work. On. An. Unwilling. Subject. Some people are good hypnotists, some are not; some people are good hypnotic subjects, some are not. But you can't hypnotize a person into doing something (or someone) they actively don't want to.
ReplyDeleteAn inexperienced or insecure person might fall for the 'dark and mysterious' routine. That doesn't mean they've been successfully hypnotized.
And I'm not sure what your gripe is with women choosing who they want to sleep with. Are you saying we should just fuck any random guy who asks? I've been turned down by guys and I don't take it as proof that the universe is conspiring against me, so I'm not sure why guys who are turned down by women can't do the same thing.
And if you get turned down a lot, work on your attitude. Nobody has an obligation to fuck you just because you're lonely, or bored, or desperate, or you haven't been laid in sooooo long.
On hypnosis: true.
ReplyDeleteIt's always posed as "taking all comers", isn't it? Not the valid observation that women are pickier, or socialized to say "No", which is the evidence of the famous campus experiment in which a male volunteer and a female volunteer went out to proposition random strangers.
See, in my experience, women aren't pickier or more socialized to say no. I can only think of a handful of serious sexual advances that I've turned down--even fewer if you exclude the ones I only turned down because I was already involved in a relationship. If I'm attracted to a guy and otherwise unattached, I'll sleep with him. If I'm not attracted to him, playing mind games isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. So to me, what you're saying simply does not correspond to any reality that I recognize.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you're not advocating 'taking all comers', what exactly are you advocating?
The amount of negativity toward the rich, literate and enlightening culture of pick-up artistry is shocking - shocking!
ReplyDeleteBe considerate. PUA is an excellent way to simulate self-confidence for guys who absolutely lack it. Instead of living an interesting life and finding ways to relate to attractive strangers, you break down what interesting and attractive people do into a series of rote steps. And then you memorize and duplicate those steps with the sincerity of an autistic.
What could be simpler?
Tee-hee, Some of us really ARE somewhere on the spectrum--I sometimes don't, for example, notice when a woman IS spontaneously interested, and I have to be watching for cues, and a lot of the wider field--StyleLife, for example, is about lifestyle changes--but mainly I like sarcasm.
ReplyDeleteDude, being awkward with women does not put you on "the spectrum." Don't fucking link us with PUAs, or try to legitimize PUA shit as some kind of social skills therapy.
DeleteAll of you need to stop bringing autism into this unless you are an actual fucking autistic person.
Eurosabra - I looked at StyleLife and it seems to be the same old shit. The first actual content I came up with (which took some digging) is an article about a guy repeatedly and harshly insulting a girl and being ridiculously defensive about not taking any "disrespect" from her until she fucks him.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the older free stuff is SSDD. You're not going to see the non-macho stuff from anyone's "system" because 1)it's all behind a pay wall and 2)it can't be used to recruit the guys who are still angry with women.
ReplyDeleteI get Twisty's central idea that het sex is BDSM without a safeword, limits to the scene, and (sometimes) consent because lots of men have über-creepy ways of getting to teh sex. Thing is, non-compliance with traditional masculinity tends to eliminate me from consideration by the (vast majority of vanilla) women who are seeking that, and pick-up is a way of modeling that for men who seek that as a solution. Patriarchy for the patriarchy-compliant. It's a form of self-presentation that will only "work" if that's what your interlocutor responds to, and some people respond to abuse.
I mean, I tend to just continue with the straight-out non-compliance, which means very hit-or-miss dating with women who are generally very odd themselves. I can see why pick-up would move some men back into the mainstream and net them cheerleaders, though.
ReplyDeleteYou're not really here for the hunting, are you?
ReplyDeleteVery cryptic remark. In practice, I set records for harmlessness. I was a medic in Jerusalem until my arthritis got too bad.
ReplyDeleteIt's the punchline to an old joke, referencing your dogged determination to bear the PUA banner in the face of all adversity here.
ReplyDeleteA hunter is out in the woods with his old .30-30. He sees a huge grizzly, fires, and only wounds it. The bear charges him, slaps the rifle out of his hand, knocks him down, and buggers him savagely.
The trouserless hunter staggers home, grabs a shotgun, loads it with slugs, and heads back into the woods to avenge his humiliation. Seeing the bear drinking, he lets fly. The bear stands up with a roar and pounces on the hunter, bowling him over, and proceeds to roger him again, quite thoroughly.
The butthurt hunter waddles into town and buys the biggest elephant gun he can find and heads back out to even the score. As he's creeping through heavy brush, he feels a tap on his shoulder.
He turns to see the bear right behind him. The bear smiles ans says "You're not really here for the hunting, are you?"
Heh, I thought it was some kind of veiled allusion to the predatory nature of some PUA, then I pondered the significance of your profile portrait, with the tricked-out civilianized M4, and figured that it was some kind of allusion to my defense of PUA being rooted in my masculinity issues, when in fact I've always been surrounded by armed women, and finally I'll just note in passing that I love the FAMAS 49/56, while my father belongs to the generation of the Czech-made 98k.
ReplyDeleteFunny, I read it as some kind of allusion to the way you keep coming back and saying, essentially, "even though I've never encountered a woman here that wasn't thoroughly creeped out by me and my PUA cheerleading and my insistence that it's really NOT misogynist despite everything available publically and the way I keep acting like women are committing a hostile act by refusing to have sex with me, I'll keep coming back and insisting neither it nor I am creepy".
ReplyDeleteOr it could have instead been some sort of veiled psychodrama about your "masculinity issues" instead of the blazingly obvious, who knows.
Yeah, well, if you're going to continually critique the public 10% of pick-up in the usual terms, I'm going to defend the 90% that remains unseen. Frankly, it's just another form of chasing, because the ultimate form of non-chasing, becoming so tremendously wealthy, powerful, and good-looking that women EVERYWHERE ALWAYS want you is off limits to 99.9% of men. So it's a refined form of begging, like all expressions of male sexuality except the overwhelmingly dominant, or the 1-in-500 case of meeting another goofy nerd who is just a perfect match.
ReplyDeleteIt's just another form of role-play, fishing for rapport, with the nastier variant having the inconvenience that it's trying to trigger someone's enactment of a socially-conventional submissive role, and the better form being a more streamlined flirting. The conversational "methods" no one among the critics really pays attention to are all about personality, and include such obvious bits of manipulation as having 3 interesting stories about oneself in mind.
Eurosabra - Yeah, well, if you're going to continually critique the public 10% of pick-up in the usual terms, I'm going to defend the 90% that remains unseen.I know it's a hackneyed allusion, but that Emperor is wearing some gorgeous robes. Answer me this: if the parts of PUA I can't see are so amazing and good-hearted, why are those parts all hidden? Why the hell would they choose to put their creepy foot forward?
ReplyDeleteor the 1-in-500 case of meeting another goofy nerd who is just a perfect match.I don't think normal human compatibility is some crazy unlikely event that only lottery winners and glamour models can pull off. Hell, I've done it ten-odd times in as many years.
It's just another form of role-play, fishing for rapportRole-play is consensual. "You be the naughty schoolgirl and I'm the strict teacher" has to be agreed to by both parties, or you're just a creep going "baaaad schoolgirl, you need a spanking" to strangers on the sidewalk.
And ordinary flirting isn't roleplay; maybe you're acting like a slightly more carefree and confident version of yourself, but it's subtle and it doesn't involve crazy RPG bullshit like codewords and assigning points, for chrissake.
You keep trying to tell us that, okay, it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and does a mating dance like a duck, but if you'd pay the money to actually dissect the thing, you'd find out it was something completely other than a duck. Forgive us for being completely skeptical, especially when *the material they make available for free to entice men to PAY MONEY FOR MORE* looks the way it does. Very few people sell a product by trying to appeal to a totally different audience in the pitch than they want for the long-term product.
ReplyDeleteBesides, you clearly don't believe your own bullshit. When you talk about being rejected or how you fail at successfully talking up women, you don't talk about how you failed to form a connection or the rapport just wasn't there or she wasn't into the same things you were. You don't talk about any of those things at all unless you've been called on something.
You talk about how she (and by extension basically all women you find attractive) refused to have sex with you, about how she PUNISHED you for still being too awkward and not fitting "society's" roles well enough for the "standard" definition of attractive. You're still doing it even as you try to convince us this is all just about teaching men to be less offputting, not about dehumanizing women into sex dolls with rules attached for access- ALL women EVERYWHERE want rich alpha males! The rest of us are just trying to make up for luck and whining and begging (for what should be rightfully ours)!
Defend PUA all you like- you're still a walking, talking confirmation of how it's EXACTLY what we think it is.
I bought into PUA doctrine for a while. Then I gave it up because 1) It eventually dawned on me that I was getting waaaaay more positive attention from women when I was my shy, nice self and 2) I realized that I was getting rejected not because I was "too nice" but because my shy, nice personality had over a period of years morphed into a bitter, misogynist one.
ReplyDeleteThat second one wasn't without causes, but when I've recently started recovering, and the more normal I get the more I see how "pick up" artistry is bullshit and how sensible women really are when you just treat them like normal people.
My point is that I'm sure many of the men who buy into this crap aren't bad people, just confused and in need of pointing in the right direction. Many of them are undoubtedly just sleazy, but not by no means all.
The guys who SELL this stuff have no excuse.
Yeah, yeah. They're marketing to a whole bunch of men with a victim mentality, and, well, I don't think you can order people not to have baggage by loudly shouting "Don't have baggage!" As for the role-play bit, I got an interesting demonstration over Cinco de Mayo, where a bunch of girls started playing the "Fake Marriage" game, but with them holding the upper hand and playing the guys off against each other, all for their passing amusement. So if it's going to be like that, I'd rather be the one asking "Can you cook?" and doing the fake take-away. Perhaps less than genuine--which is why I didn't join in--but the assembled multitudes were early20s, and I'm not. Anyway, the kids had harmless fun, right? The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
ReplyDeleteI mean, my role was obviously "Old d00d who knows interesting trivia", which is a nice pigeon-hole to have to work your way out of if you're seriously attracted to anyone present, but a respectable persona if you're not, and, well, I suppose from my lack of effort at bonding we can assume I wasn't. I did learn a lot about sorority culture, though, for example, what a "Date Dash" is.
Er, how about just getting on with your life & doing something interesting? If you aren't attracting girls, maybe you aren't very interesting. Try doing a more interesting job or growing a personality, instead of making PUA your hobby. Art school, for example, is an excellent place for meeting women, also night classes (90% women).
ReplyDeletePUA often seems to be all about the game & the technique & telling your fellow PUAs about it and not about the getting a cool girlfriend.
@Eurosabra: as per Darwinian evolutionary imperatives, unsexy men are NOT supposed to pollute the gene pool with their inferior offspring. Therefore, they are not supposed to have any success whatsoever with women. That way they are guaranteed not to breed. This is because "sexy" men are the ones who are the winners who will produce better and more successful progeny. So PUA culture is a complete perversion of the survival of the fittest, and must die.
ReplyDeleteAnon - That's not how evolution works. If an individual can promote his chances of breeding by any means, then he breeds--there's no "cheating" at this game. If you breed, you are fit; there are no other standards.
ReplyDeletePUA doesn't work, so that's another issue, but you can't "pervert" survival of the fittest--if you survive, you're fit, even if you're a douchebag.
*applauds wildly* BRAVA!
ReplyDelete--CoronerCountess