Purely consensual and voluntary is muddy territory when a bunch of your friends are doing a thing together.
How is PUA nonconsensual? You’re acting in certain ways that encourage a woman to respond in certain ways. Is she forced to respond to negs by becoming more attracted to you? You’re creating a social environment/interaction that’s designed to change the way someone feels either way.
The difference is in the awareness of the participants.
In PUA, you don’t tell the person you are interacting with “I am about to engage in the following techniques to manipulate your response to me...” And then explain which techniques you are going to use, and then ask her if it’s ok for you to use those techniques.
Contrarily, in these rituals participants have been given the fore-knowledge of “Hey, these are the techniques that we will be using in the ritual to manipulate your emotional responses...” and implicitly consent by showing up. On top of that, for our ritual we started with a meta section, where I straight out repeated what was going to happen, and what the goal was, etc.
The problem isn’t in the consent of the specific people who want to do it, it’s with instituting it as a group thing that you do. Maybe I really really hate ritual (I do), but I really like every person going to this party, and this might be my only chance to see them in the same place all year. So I might go, and suffer through the ritual. This is “Consent” but I don’t think it’s what you want, and it’s not what I’d want out of a group.
I attempted to alleviate this by breaking the party into two days. Some people noted that coming to the second day gave you the feeling that you had “missed out” on the main event (which you basically had, but which I don’t think was actually dramatically worse than “everyone went to see a good movie and/or play a really good game yesterday, and they were all excited and talking about it.”)
It was noted that having the ritual on the second day might address that issue. It may not be possible for logistical reasons (people need to be able to stay up late after the ritual because they’ll want to do that, so you can’t have it on Sunday evening, but then the non-ritual event needs to be on Friday, which may be harder for people to make when they’re coming from out of state)
More on this problem later. But basically—I think people are overly critical of group consent when the word ritual gets tacked onto an activity, but the general concern of “how to hold megameetups that are valuable and encourage many people to come but don’t alienate and/or annoy people” is an important one.
This is kind of a tangent but I’m curious as to how you view PUA as nonconsensual, compared to eg, just being charming, or friendly or nice. Do you announce every interaction with “Now I am being nice to you, because I want you to like me more.”?
I am going to officially request that we not make the comments section of this post a discussion about PUA. It’s a valuable topic, but please, not here.
I won’t go too far this tangential rabbit hole, especially since it has been covered quite a lot on here previously. But a quick answer:
I am actually a PUA moderate. I don’t think Dark Arts or their usage are inherently bad. There are some bad practices (i.e. things that cause the target to feel bad) and ideas (i.e. lets focus on “Women” being manipulatable, rather than “People” being manipulatable.) there, but People Having Social Skills is good, and systematizing can be useful.
That said, my comment about fore-knowledge was to show how informed ritual and PUA are completely different anyways, and the comparison doesn’t hold. So we don’t even have to go into the PUA discussion.
Purely consensual and voluntary is muddy territory when a bunch of your friends are doing a thing together.
How is PUA nonconsensual? You’re acting in certain ways that encourage a woman to respond in certain ways. Is she forced to respond to negs by becoming more attracted to you? You’re creating a social environment/interaction that’s designed to change the way someone feels either way.
The difference is in the awareness of the participants.
In PUA, you don’t tell the person you are interacting with “I am about to engage in the following techniques to manipulate your response to me...” And then explain which techniques you are going to use, and then ask her if it’s ok for you to use those techniques.
Contrarily, in these rituals participants have been given the fore-knowledge of “Hey, these are the techniques that we will be using in the ritual to manipulate your emotional responses...” and implicitly consent by showing up. On top of that, for our ritual we started with a meta section, where I straight out repeated what was going to happen, and what the goal was, etc.
The problem isn’t in the consent of the specific people who want to do it, it’s with instituting it as a group thing that you do. Maybe I really really hate ritual (I do), but I really like every person going to this party, and this might be my only chance to see them in the same place all year. So I might go, and suffer through the ritual. This is “Consent” but I don’t think it’s what you want, and it’s not what I’d want out of a group.
I attempted to alleviate this by breaking the party into two days. Some people noted that coming to the second day gave you the feeling that you had “missed out” on the main event (which you basically had, but which I don’t think was actually dramatically worse than “everyone went to see a good movie and/or play a really good game yesterday, and they were all excited and talking about it.”)
It was noted that having the ritual on the second day might address that issue. It may not be possible for logistical reasons (people need to be able to stay up late after the ritual because they’ll want to do that, so you can’t have it on Sunday evening, but then the non-ritual event needs to be on Friday, which may be harder for people to make when they’re coming from out of state)
More on this problem later. But basically—I think people are overly critical of group consent when the word ritual gets tacked onto an activity, but the general concern of “how to hold megameetups that are valuable and encourage many people to come but don’t alienate and/or annoy people” is an important one.
This is kind of a tangent but I’m curious as to how you view PUA as nonconsensual, compared to eg, just being charming, or friendly or nice. Do you announce every interaction with “Now I am being nice to you, because I want you to like me more.”?
I am going to officially request that we not make the comments section of this post a discussion about PUA. It’s a valuable topic, but please, not here.
I won’t go too far this tangential rabbit hole, especially since it has been covered quite a lot on here previously. But a quick answer:
I am actually a PUA moderate. I don’t think Dark Arts or their usage are inherently bad. There are some bad practices (i.e. things that cause the target to feel bad) and ideas (i.e. lets focus on “Women” being manipulatable, rather than “People” being manipulatable.) there, but People Having Social Skills is good, and systematizing can be useful.
That said, my comment about fore-knowledge was to show how informed ritual and PUA are completely different anyways, and the comparison doesn’t hold. So we don’t even have to go into the PUA discussion.