Insisting that a guy’s acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape is, at best, an application of the rhetorical trick of referring to disfavored things by the worst label logically associable to them (the counterpart is referring to favored things by the best label logically associable to them). It is a violation of the virtue of narrowness.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
“If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.”
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is not rape.
In and of itself, it seems to me that at least potentially it is deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor.
However unless you believe that pick-up targets’ relevant decision-making would be totally unaffected by the knowledge that the person approaching them was a PUA using specific PUA techniques, then concealing that fact from the pick-up target is an attempt to obtain sex without the target’s free and informed consent. If you know fact X, and you know fact X is a potential deal-breaker with regard to their decision whether or not to sleep with you, you have a moral obligation to disclose X.
…it’s well-established in general societal morals that obtaining sex by deception is a form of non-violent rape. If you’re having sex with someone knowing that they are ignorant of relevant facts which if they knew them would stop them having sex with you, then you are not having sex with their free and informed consent.
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.
Pretending that someone has actually argued for this position when nobody has done so is a Straw Man argument and probably also a case of poisoning the well.
Edited to add some more specific content: Contrast what you are doing here with the principle of charity, or the principle quoted here:
If the people who are distorting and downvoting criticisms of PUA instead engaged constructively with those criticisms to improve them or focus them on that subset of PUA beliefs and methods that they are willing to accept as True Scotsmen then this discussion would get much further, much faster.
You said this
and this
What’s the charitable interpretation of that?
To begin with, the charitable interpretation is that since I didn’t say “deliberately depriving the target of access to relevant facts that they would wish to know before making a decision whether or not to engage socially, sexually or romantically with the suppressor” is rape that you should not interpret me as saying that. You were saying “X is not rape” as if that claim ended the matter, and in response I was saying “X is depriving the target of facts which you know are highly likely to be relevant to their decision to interact with you and this is morally questionable regardless of whether or not it goes in the category of things that are rape”.
A rational women would, I imagine, prefer to have access to a man’s un-spoofed social signals so that she could avoid interacting with men who are lacking in confidence or who are nervous, because those signals convey that the man in question is likely to be lacking underlying qualities like self-esteem, sexual experience and so forth. Spoofing those signals so that those who lack the underlying qualities that give rise to confidence is depriving the woman of relevant and important information so the man can get laid.
Secondly, you are the one who tried to substitute “acting confident and suppressing nervousness” in to replace what we were actually discussing, which was the fact that the person approaching the hypothetical woman was a PUA using specific PUA techniques. I brought us back to the topic in the next paragraph. That is a piece of information which I believe would be a deal-breaker for a large number of entirely rational women and hence there is an immediate ethical problem with a PUA concealing it.
Construing the final paragraph you quoted as saying that “Acting confident and suppressing nervousness is rape” seems wilfully obtuse. The question is whether concealing information that would be a deal-breaker for a substantial number of informed and rational women belongs in the same moral category as rape. I tend to think it does, although conceivably you could argue that it’s closer in nature to fraud.