Let me summarize in my own words some of the points in your post:
Many members of the PUA community:
take it too far and believe that newbies should immediately dive head-first into doing uncomfortable and anxiety-producing approaches in often-hostile environments. (Which causes these newbies to wall off their real selves and hide behind manufactured personalities.)
are paranoid about girls cheating on them and think a single slip into beta-provider mode may seal a crushing and depressing fate. (Which prevents them from opening up and showing vulnerability, which is required for escalating into a love relationship.)
believe that showing weakness in a relationship is always and everywhere a poor tactic. (Which causes the same problem as the last bullet.)
are depressed even if they have had a lot of success attracting women, as evidenced by two of the key individuals, Tyler and Mystery, encountering this issue. (Which shows that PUA working for seduction doesn’t necessary mean it works for a good life.)
lose a sufficient amount of skill after a short enough time out of the game to suggest that they failed to create deeply-rooted changes in themselves. (Which stands as more evidence that PUA teaches people how to put on an act rather than how to truly improve themselves.)
Am I on the right track?
Although I agree with you on all of these claims, I don’t agree with you on what I perceive to be the overall argument you’re constructing, which is that reading a large selection of material from the PUA community is unlikely to be a good way for a man to better himself in the realm of achieving genuine connections with women he desires either sexually or romantically.
Before I continue: Have you read HughRistik’s writing here on Less Wrong?
Yes. Let’s start by explictly stating my position:
There are man who get into PUA and develop skills that make it easy to get laid. Those aren’t the majority. There are other man who get damanged by PUA and get hold back in their development.
Before I continue: Have you read HughRistik’s writing here on Less Wrong?
That post basically argues that woman don’t know what they want.The evidence that it brings is that the mating preferences that woman give out when you give them a questionaire don’t match what other studies found in a controlled experiment.
That’s a bad belief to have. It prevents guys from having deep conversations with women about their desires.
If you look at the Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller point of view as articulated on http://thematinggrounds.com/ one of the aspects that a guy can learn by actually listening to woman is woman’s desire for safety.
When a guy goes on a date his biggest fear is getting rejected. Often for woman a big fear is getting physically violated.
That’s not something that the mating priorities questionaire that HughRistik cites or even gathers data on.
In some sense you could argue that Mating Grounds is PUA material but Tucker Max would take that as an insult as he consider PUA to do more harm than good. I think a guy who wants to get layed will do better by taking that book than by taking one about 2008 PUA.
We believe that most “Pick-up Artists” are sociopathic, bullshit scammers. The PUA scene is not transformational, it’s transactional. Its not about getting to know women, it’s about getting over on them. We believe Mating Grounds is the answer to the PUA strategy for all those men who have nothing meaningful to show for their efforts.
Other more substantial things that are wrong about PUA from my perspective:
The language. Terms like k-close and f-close serve to disassociate emotions. Just because a word like sex is charged with emotions doesn’t mean that it should be avoided. If man feel uneasy about speaking those words they should explore their relationship with those words instead of replacing it with more constructed language.
Treaing woman as numbers. It prevent deeper relating.
The PUA theory of physical escalation. I consider it much better to feel into what feels good to both parties of the interaction than to focus on an interlectual ladder of physical escalation.
If you have a group of people who actually feel into what’s right, you can have events where men and women dance naked together. Those events suffer greatly from people who operate with the PUA mindset.
That post basically argues that woman don’t know what they want. …
This belief is broadly correct wrt. attraction. Safety is not remotely the same thing as attraction—it is psychologically a very different need. That’s why when women started opening up about the importance for them of physical safety (or even just the clear perception of safety) in public settings, many PUAs actually listened to them. They came up with guidelines like ‘always leave a line of retreat’ - and these guidelines turned out to work strikingly well in the field, and so became increasingly popular. This is perhaps the clearest possible example of beliefs paying rent, no matter where they originally came from. It’s how an empirically-focused art improves.
k-close and f-close …
These are flawed terms, but there is an important insight behind them. Namely, that the preconditions for having sex are not very different from the ones that will lead to you two kissing/making out (k-close) or exchanging numbers (#-close) - all of these are ‘closes’ that reflect some level of commitment. That the ‘f-close’ is thus not something far-fetched and unachievable, but something that can potentially be reached, provided that you approach it with the right sequence of steps or ‘courtship dance’. And yes, this does require ongoing attention to “what feels good”, but that’s not enough. Having a clear framework to hang it all on is very helpful, even from a pure emotional POV.
That’s why when women started opening up about the importance for them of physical safety (or even just the clear perception of safety) in public settings, many PUAs actually listened to them.
The problem is that while some PUAs actually listen a lot of people who read PUA material don’t think that it’s valuable to listen to women for their perspective. The might speak with other PUA’s in their lair but think that the outside world is stupid. It produces an intellectual fantasy world in which not enough reflection happens.
I don’t think guidelines itself are enough. Actually having deep conversations is the key to understanding other people.
Having a clear framework to hang it all on is very helpful, even from a pure emotional POV.
It’s an emotional shield to prevent certain emotions from being felt. The PUA focuses on intellectual steps instead of being in touch with the emotions of the moment.
The shield disassociates the emotion more if the goal is considered to be a ‘f-close’ instead of the goal being considered sex.
I’m not sure to what extend that feature is be design or simply by memetic evolution but it’s there.
And yes, this does require ongoing attention to “what feels good”, but that’s not enough.
The problem is that the guidelines don’t work well. I remember one naked dance event led by a tantra bodywork person. A guy who earn part of his money with giving erotic massages to woman.
We danced naked but the rule was not doing it with a sexual vibe. One guy didn’t get it, and that hurt the event. The standard PUA model doesn’t even acknowledge that you can touch the same part of the body with a sexual vibe and can also touch it with a nonsexual vibe.
There are a lot of professional at human touch who have thought about how it works and PUA largely ignores that knowledge base and instead orients itself on techniques developed in bars and clubs.
Just like there a lot of professional knowledge about coaching that PUA don’t interface with much.
Mating Grounds: The prototypical feminist alternative to PUA, which is to say, it removes women from one box, and shoves them in another, and pretends that’s an improvement because they don’t use words they declare as harmful (even as they repackage all the same concepts into other boxes). They’re standard PUA rebranded with more feminist labeling, pretending to be morally superior while engaging in the same behaviors.
“This isn’t PUA. PUA is a disgusting reduction of women to sexual transactions.” What the hell do you think all of that is? “Nothing meaningful to show for their efforts” = “We’ll get you sex!”. They’re telling men that they have the cheat codes to sex, same as every other PUA-peddler out there.
I can seduce -anybody-. I’m not even unique—I’m not a decent human being, but it just requires acting like a decent human being. No tricks, no magic sequence of steps, no nothing. It just amounts to paying attention to the other human being who is sitting across from you, and realizing that, hey, they’re human too, they also want sex and intimacy and affection and to feel loved, and giving them what they want means getting what you want. But “Give the other person what they want” means realizing that -both- parties in the relationship are equal, -both- parties in the relationship both want the same things, and that -both- parties in the relationship both have something to offer and need to give their partner what their partner needs, and apparently it is too goddamn hard for people to think in terms of what their -partner- desires, rather than the magic Ur-Woman In The Heart of All Women Who Must Be Satisfied To Dispense Sex.
Calling Tucker Max who might be one of the people who attracted most feminists to demostrate against him for a prototypical feminist seems a bit far fetched.
Just like the accomplished evolutionary pschology professor Geoffrey Miller is prototypical feminist.
If you call an actually evolutionary psychology professors feminist because he don’t share the ideas about how mating works that the PUA community has, maybe your view of reality is a bit distorted.
I am calling him a prototypical feminist (which is distinct from a feminist—that modifier is there for a reason) because he’s failing in the same way feminists do, for the same reasons. He exemplifies a common failure mode of feminism.
I’m not sure about your use of language (I’m guessing at what you mean because some critical words are missing, there), but I am precise about what words I use, and why.
Drawing your judgement from the academic literature on evolutionary psychology is failing for the reasons feminists fail? That as far as Geoffrey Miller goes.
As far as Tucker Max goes, are you aware you Tucker Max happens to be and why he’s hated by feminists?
I’m not commenting on Geoffrey Miller, no matter how many times you bring him up.
And nope. No idea who Tucker is, and don’t really care. I read a few pages from the site you linked, and my criticism is exactly what it is: He moves women from one box, and into another. He fails for the same reason many feminists do; because he believes in a virtuous stereotype, regards other stereotypes as unvirtuous, and attempts to stereotype in a more positive way. Charitably, he recognizes that the stereotype is a problem, but is incapable of moving past a social level and into the level of individual, so supplants one stereotype with another. Uncharitably, he just thinks other people’s stereotypes are wrong, and that his is correct.
What feminists think of him doesn’t matter to me in the least. More, that feminists hate him doesn’t surprise me, since they’re fundamentally similar with slight aesthetic differences, which is always a recipe for deep hatred.
He moves women from one box, and into another. He fails for the same reason many feminists do; because he believes in a virtuous stereotype, regards other stereotypes as unvirtuous, and attempts to stereotype in a more positive way.
Calling a person who got famous enough to hit the TIME 100 by telling the world a lot of nonvirtues stories about himself “believing in a virtuous stereotype” mistakes who he is.
Terms like k-close and f-close serve to disassociate emotions. Just because a word like sex is charged with emotions doesn’t mean that it should be avoided. If man feel uneasy about speaking those words they should explore their relationship with those words instead of replacing it with more constructed language.
I agree that many men in the PUA community use jargon such as “k-close” and “f-close” as a technique for disassociating emotions. Where we differ is that you’re condemning this method whereas I believe it’s a crucial tool to have available.
First of all, let’s consider where the emotions come from.
If a man is choosing between saying “I had sex with a beautiful woman I met last weekend” and “I f-closed a solid 8 last weekend”, he’s choosing between different linguistic constructions. The thought remains the same. In both cases, he imagines the woman, the situation, and the interaction. The difference, rather, is in the realm of cached thoughts and emotions. When he says the former, his mind transitions to associations relating to mainstream thought. When he says the latter, his cognition completes the pattern straight into the received wisdom and social influences of the PUA community.
Note that you are operating firmly within the current of mainstream thought on this topic. This isn’t to say that you’re wrong. You may very well be on the right track in your criticisms of PUA. But nevertheless your thoughts on this subject demonstrate absolutely no break from the mainstream of polite society. This is the only information we need to understand why you prefer to use terms like “sex” rather than “f-close”.
For better or for worse, the PUA community contains a lot of information which is very much contrary to mainstream thinking and tends to draw very strong, negative emotions from the average person. Imagine a socially active and happy person using mainstream language yet trying to retain PUA-type beliefs. The amount of stoicism required to avoid cracking under social pressure would be immense.
The ultimate conclusion is this. You value the mainstream on this subject, so it’s concerning to you that PUA writers run away from terms like “sex” because they don’t want the associations which come along for the ride. But I’m in a different position: I think the mainstream is on the wrong track on questions relating to gender politics, thus I myself consider it very important to erect a firewall against what I see as mind control.
You phrased your objection as a separate point, but at the most fundamental level your problem with the language is a repetition of your problem with the community’s beliefs.
That’s a bad belief to have. It prevents guys from having deep conversations with women about their desires.
Note that the PUA community is very unusual in that it’s a bunch of guys who tend to be somewhat nerdy, intellectual, or analytical, chasing after girls who tend to fall into the category of “girls who are fun and social”. It’s not that women don’t know what they want; it’s that the girls PUA practitioners tend to pursue do not speak the same language. If a large number of PUA writers switched their focus to sex with nerdy girls, I’m certain they would quickly “discover” that literal communication about desires is important.
The idea that you shouldn’t take a woman’s word at face value is a very prevalent meme in PUA, and it’s certainly adaptive in its context. But that doesn’t mean it applies to you. Whenever you run into a piece of advice which seems totally wrong, you must take into account that the person’s life experiences and desires may be very different from yours. What works in one context doesn’t necessarily seem sane in another.
I’ll continue onto your other points after we sort out this part.
A lot of dating advice is seemingly more on why “X is better” rather than what you should be actually doing. The well is poisoned and nobody is stopping to think why people die a short amount of time after they drink from it.
No belief pays rent in those cultures, and nobody gets evicted for unpaid debt either.
They’re often anti-epistemology and their epistemology covers as much as the emperor’s clothes, and any instrumental advice they may have is like a smith handing out unsharpened swords to soldiers.
One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.
Ken Thompson
Let’s throw away 1000 words of advice and see what we can get.
Let me summarize in my own words some of the points in your post:
Many members of the PUA community:
take it too far and believe that newbies should immediately dive head-first into doing uncomfortable and anxiety-producing approaches in often-hostile environments. (Which causes these newbies to wall off their real selves and hide behind manufactured personalities.)
are paranoid about girls cheating on them and think a single slip into beta-provider mode may seal a crushing and depressing fate. (Which prevents them from opening up and showing vulnerability, which is required for escalating into a love relationship.)
believe that showing weakness in a relationship is always and everywhere a poor tactic. (Which causes the same problem as the last bullet.)
are depressed even if they have had a lot of success attracting women, as evidenced by two of the key individuals, Tyler and Mystery, encountering this issue. (Which shows that PUA working for seduction doesn’t necessary mean it works for a good life.)
lose a sufficient amount of skill after a short enough time out of the game to suggest that they failed to create deeply-rooted changes in themselves. (Which stands as more evidence that PUA teaches people how to put on an act rather than how to truly improve themselves.)
Am I on the right track?
Although I agree with you on all of these claims, I don’t agree with you on what I perceive to be the overall argument you’re constructing, which is that reading a large selection of material from the PUA community is unlikely to be a good way for a man to better himself in the realm of achieving genuine connections with women he desires either sexually or romantically.
Before I continue: Have you read HughRistik’s writing here on Less Wrong?
Yes. Let’s start by explictly stating my position: There are man who get into PUA and develop skills that make it easy to get laid. Those aren’t the majority. There are other man who get damanged by PUA and get hold back in their development.
A bit of what he actually wrote on LW but I don’t think the majority of the linked articles. But let’s take one http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/04/26/do-women-know-what-they-want/
That post basically argues that woman don’t know what they want.The evidence that it brings is that the mating preferences that woman give out when you give them a questionaire don’t match what other studies found in a controlled experiment.
That’s a bad belief to have. It prevents guys from having deep conversations with women about their desires. If you look at the Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller point of view as articulated on http://thematinggrounds.com/ one of the aspects that a guy can learn by actually listening to woman is woman’s desire for safety. When a guy goes on a date his biggest fear is getting rejected. Often for woman a big fear is getting physically violated.
That’s not something that the mating priorities questionaire that HughRistik cites or even gathers data on.
In some sense you could argue that Mating Grounds is PUA material but Tucker Max would take that as an insult as he consider PUA to do more harm than good. I think a guy who wants to get layed will do better by taking that book than by taking one about 2008 PUA.
Mating Grounds about PUA:
Other more substantial things that are wrong about PUA from my perspective:
The language. Terms like k-close and f-close serve to disassociate emotions. Just because a word like sex is charged with emotions doesn’t mean that it should be avoided. If man feel uneasy about speaking those words they should explore their relationship with those words instead of replacing it with more constructed language.
Treaing woman as numbers. It prevent deeper relating.
The PUA theory of physical escalation. I consider it much better to feel into what feels good to both parties of the interaction than to focus on an interlectual ladder of physical escalation. If you have a group of people who actually feel into what’s right, you can have events where men and women dance naked together. Those events suffer greatly from people who operate with the PUA mindset.
This belief is broadly correct wrt. attraction. Safety is not remotely the same thing as attraction—it is psychologically a very different need. That’s why when women started opening up about the importance for them of physical safety (or even just the clear perception of safety) in public settings, many PUAs actually listened to them. They came up with guidelines like ‘always leave a line of retreat’ - and these guidelines turned out to work strikingly well in the field, and so became increasingly popular. This is perhaps the clearest possible example of beliefs paying rent, no matter where they originally came from. It’s how an empirically-focused art improves.
These are flawed terms, but there is an important insight behind them. Namely, that the preconditions for having sex are not very different from the ones that will lead to you two kissing/making out (k-close) or exchanging numbers (#-close) - all of these are ‘closes’ that reflect some level of commitment. That the ‘f-close’ is thus not something far-fetched and unachievable, but something that can potentially be reached, provided that you approach it with the right sequence of steps or ‘courtship dance’. And yes, this does require ongoing attention to “what feels good”, but that’s not enough. Having a clear framework to hang it all on is very helpful, even from a pure emotional POV.
The problem is that while some PUAs actually listen a lot of people who read PUA material don’t think that it’s valuable to listen to women for their perspective. The might speak with other PUA’s in their lair but think that the outside world is stupid. It produces an intellectual fantasy world in which not enough reflection happens.
I don’t think guidelines itself are enough. Actually having deep conversations is the key to understanding other people.
It’s an emotional shield to prevent certain emotions from being felt. The PUA focuses on intellectual steps instead of being in touch with the emotions of the moment. The shield disassociates the emotion more if the goal is considered to be a ‘f-close’ instead of the goal being considered sex.
I’m not sure to what extend that feature is be design or simply by memetic evolution but it’s there.
The problem is that the guidelines don’t work well. I remember one naked dance event led by a tantra bodywork person. A guy who earn part of his money with giving erotic massages to woman.
We danced naked but the rule was not doing it with a sexual vibe. One guy didn’t get it, and that hurt the event. The standard PUA model doesn’t even acknowledge that you can touch the same part of the body with a sexual vibe and can also touch it with a nonsexual vibe.
There are a lot of professional at human touch who have thought about how it works and PUA largely ignores that knowledge base and instead orients itself on techniques developed in bars and clubs.
Just like there a lot of professional knowledge about coaching that PUA don’t interface with much.
Mating Grounds: The prototypical feminist alternative to PUA, which is to say, it removes women from one box, and shoves them in another, and pretends that’s an improvement because they don’t use words they declare as harmful (even as they repackage all the same concepts into other boxes). They’re standard PUA rebranded with more feminist labeling, pretending to be morally superior while engaging in the same behaviors.
“This isn’t PUA. PUA is a disgusting reduction of women to sexual transactions.” What the hell do you think all of that is? “Nothing meaningful to show for their efforts” = “We’ll get you sex!”. They’re telling men that they have the cheat codes to sex, same as every other PUA-peddler out there.
I can seduce -anybody-. I’m not even unique—I’m not a decent human being, but it just requires acting like a decent human being. No tricks, no magic sequence of steps, no nothing. It just amounts to paying attention to the other human being who is sitting across from you, and realizing that, hey, they’re human too, they also want sex and intimacy and affection and to feel loved, and giving them what they want means getting what you want. But “Give the other person what they want” means realizing that -both- parties in the relationship are equal, -both- parties in the relationship both want the same things, and that -both- parties in the relationship both have something to offer and need to give their partner what their partner needs, and apparently it is too goddamn hard for people to think in terms of what their -partner- desires, rather than the magic Ur-Woman In The Heart of All Women Who Must Be Satisfied To Dispense Sex.
Blind leading the friggin’ blind.
Calling Tucker Max who might be one of the people who attracted most feminists to demostrate against him for a prototypical feminist seems a bit far fetched. Just like the accomplished evolutionary pschology professor Geoffrey Miller is prototypical feminist.
If you call an actually evolutionary psychology professors feminist because he don’t share the ideas about how mating works that the PUA community has, maybe your view of reality is a bit distorted.
I am calling him a prototypical feminist (which is distinct from a feminist—that modifier is there for a reason) because he’s failing in the same way feminists do, for the same reasons. He exemplifies a common failure mode of feminism.
I’m not sure about your use of language (I’m guessing at what you mean because some critical words are missing, there), but I am precise about what words I use, and why.
Drawing your judgement from the academic literature on evolutionary psychology is failing for the reasons feminists fail? That as far as Geoffrey Miller goes.
As far as Tucker Max goes, are you aware you Tucker Max happens to be and why he’s hated by feminists?
I’m not commenting on Geoffrey Miller, no matter how many times you bring him up.
And nope. No idea who Tucker is, and don’t really care. I read a few pages from the site you linked, and my criticism is exactly what it is: He moves women from one box, and into another. He fails for the same reason many feminists do; because he believes in a virtuous stereotype, regards other stereotypes as unvirtuous, and attempts to stereotype in a more positive way. Charitably, he recognizes that the stereotype is a problem, but is incapable of moving past a social level and into the level of individual, so supplants one stereotype with another. Uncharitably, he just thinks other people’s stereotypes are wrong, and that his is correct.
What feminists think of him doesn’t matter to me in the least. More, that feminists hate him doesn’t surprise me, since they’re fundamentally similar with slight aesthetic differences, which is always a recipe for deep hatred.
Calling a person who got famous enough to hit the TIME 100 by telling the world a lot of nonvirtues stories about himself “believing in a virtuous stereotype” mistakes who he is.
I agree that many men in the PUA community use jargon such as “k-close” and “f-close” as a technique for disassociating emotions. Where we differ is that you’re condemning this method whereas I believe it’s a crucial tool to have available.
First of all, let’s consider where the emotions come from.
If a man is choosing between saying “I had sex with a beautiful woman I met last weekend” and “I f-closed a solid 8 last weekend”, he’s choosing between different linguistic constructions. The thought remains the same. In both cases, he imagines the woman, the situation, and the interaction. The difference, rather, is in the realm of cached thoughts and emotions. When he says the former, his mind transitions to associations relating to mainstream thought. When he says the latter, his cognition completes the pattern straight into the received wisdom and social influences of the PUA community.
Note that you are operating firmly within the current of mainstream thought on this topic. This isn’t to say that you’re wrong. You may very well be on the right track in your criticisms of PUA. But nevertheless your thoughts on this subject demonstrate absolutely no break from the mainstream of polite society. This is the only information we need to understand why you prefer to use terms like “sex” rather than “f-close”.
For better or for worse, the PUA community contains a lot of information which is very much contrary to mainstream thinking and tends to draw very strong, negative emotions from the average person. Imagine a socially active and happy person using mainstream language yet trying to retain PUA-type beliefs. The amount of stoicism required to avoid cracking under social pressure would be immense.
The ultimate conclusion is this. You value the mainstream on this subject, so it’s concerning to you that PUA writers run away from terms like “sex” because they don’t want the associations which come along for the ride. But I’m in a different position: I think the mainstream is on the wrong track on questions relating to gender politics, thus I myself consider it very important to erect a firewall against what I see as mind control.
You phrased your objection as a separate point, but at the most fundamental level your problem with the language is a repetition of your problem with the community’s beliefs.
Note that the PUA community is very unusual in that it’s a bunch of guys who tend to be somewhat nerdy, intellectual, or analytical, chasing after girls who tend to fall into the category of “girls who are fun and social”. It’s not that women don’t know what they want; it’s that the girls PUA practitioners tend to pursue do not speak the same language. If a large number of PUA writers switched their focus to sex with nerdy girls, I’m certain they would quickly “discover” that literal communication about desires is important.
The idea that you shouldn’t take a woman’s word at face value is a very prevalent meme in PUA, and it’s certainly adaptive in its context. But that doesn’t mean it applies to you. Whenever you run into a piece of advice which seems totally wrong, you must take into account that the person’s life experiences and desires may be very different from yours. What works in one context doesn’t necessarily seem sane in another.
I’ll continue onto your other points after we sort out this part.
I’ll be straight to the point—dating advice considered harmful.
A lot of dating advice is seemingly more on why “X is better” rather than what you should be actually doing. The well is poisoned and nobody is stopping to think why people die a short amount of time after they drink from it.
No belief pays rent in those cultures, and nobody gets evicted for unpaid debt either.
They’re often anti-epistemology and their epistemology covers as much as the emperor’s clothes, and any instrumental advice they may have is like a smith handing out unsharpened swords to soldiers.
Let’s throw away 1000 words of advice and see what we can get.