Power, yes. Her point of view not being relevant? I don’t know, I guess it depends on how you treat your sister.
Remember, the claim of PUAs (who advocate such techniques; not all do) is that a large enough percentage of women responds well to such treatment and enjoy it. You may well be skeptical of that claim. I am skeptical that the percentage is as high as some PUAs make it sound.
If you disagree with the tactic, I suggest that you follow it down to the root and look at the premises, and what reasons PUAs have to believe that women are reasonably likely to enjoy this kind of treatment. If the woman’s sexual preference is to be treated that way, then it’s not treating her point of view as not “revelant,” it the opposite: the PUA is taking into account the woman’s point of view by giving her what she enjoys. Whenever we look at weird and wacky PUA tactics, we really need to be thinking about what responses PUAs have got from women that make them think (correctly or incorrectly) that such behavior is viable and reasonable. We cannot assume that such behavior is primarily driven by their own preferences, or that it merely a jerk-like imposition on the part of PUAs.
The fact that PUAs advocate a certain behavior as attractive to women is sufficient to locate the hypothesis that they might actually be correct, and we should consider that hypothesis along with the hypothesis that PUAs are biased, or that such behavior is an imposition of their own preferences rather than women’s.
I have my own objections to the “bratty little sister” frame, primarily because I want to be dating someone who is an equal. A little teasing is always great, but if I wouldn’t want an interaction with a woman where I persistently felt that my role was too close to the role of a big brother, while her role was too close to that of a bratty little sister. Moreover, I think that many men have this same preference, and so would be best served by forms of seduction that promote equality.
Note that my objection is from my own preferences (and the preferences that I think more people should hold); I think the effectiveness and ethics of such behavior is less clear-cut.
You say “power relationship” like it’s a bad thing. My own preference may be similar to yours in that I dislike persistent and overarching power dynamics in my relationships (and I think that a lot of power dynamics are actively harmful), but lots of people, male and female, really do like relationships with gendered power dynamics, and seem to do just fine in them. As long as these relationships are chosen freely, I don’t have a sufficient basis to say that there is something wrong with the preferences of those people, or with satisfying those preferences.
Tentatively offered, but it’s possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of “some women” or “many women” rather than implying that what they’re doing works well with all women, there’d be a lot less social friction.
This may or may not be something you want, but part of this conversation is why there are so few women at LW.
Tentatively offered, but it’s possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of “some women” or “many women” rather than implying that what they’re doing works well with all women, there’d be a lot less social friction.
I would also like to see more rigor in describing the responses of different subsets of women. When PUAs talk among themselves, qualifiers do get to be a drag, even if a PUA has more complex views. I think more rigor would be worth it, and I find the tendency of PUAs to use language with negative implications annoying and socially unintelligent (“social intelligence” is a buzzword in the community).
In this regard, I found your comments elsewhere in the thread quite helpful to my understanding:
Yes, my broader point is that a lot of the observations of PUAs are based on the women they meet the most often. The type of women they meet the most often is club-goers of above average attractiveness. The average intelligence of these women is likely to be around the population average, they are probably above average in extraversion, and they have highly “people-oriented” interests (and they may well be above average in neuroticism and below average in conscientiousness).
and
So when we see PUAs holding cynical attitudes towards women, such as “chick crack,” or talking about women as children or pets (these last attitudes are rare, but not unheard of), we should consider that they are unfairly comparing average women to themselves. When PUAs talk about women like they are a different species, perhaps it is because average-intelligence people-oriented female extraverts do seem like a different species from 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts.
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist. To the extent this lack of qualifiers has been imported into the limited discussion of PUA techniques on LW (which I think it has to at least some extent), then this may be part of why the discussion has met with resistance and offense.
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist.
Exactly. We are seeing two relevant categories of women that I will give the following labels to:
“Atypical women.” This category of women has a combination of the following traits: gender-nonconforming, thing-oriented, introverted, non-neurotypical. Highly intelligent people of both genders also tend to be gender-atypical. Women likely to be interested in posting on LW are likely to fall into this category. Feminists, queer women, polyamorous women, kinky women, artists, and nerds also tend to fall into this category. (Feel free to ask why I would group any of those categories of women together.)
“Typical women.” This category of women is more gender-typical and people-oriented.
This division is inspired by Gangestad et al.’s finding that people fit into two taxa: a majority taxon of gender typical people (85%+ of people), and a minority taxon of gender of atypical people (queer people were mostly in this taxon). If anyone is bothered by terms like “atypical women” or “typical women,” bring it up and we’ll talk about the stats.
I would categorize the relationship of these two taxa of females as follows:
The model PUAs have of women in the gender-atypical minority taxon sucks.
The model that many women in the gender-atypical taxon have of other women in the gender-typical taxon, also sucks.
As a result, PUAs and women in the minority taxon often miss each other like ships in the dark, and have fundamentally different experiences in heterosexual interaction, even they have a lot of psychological similarities.
Yet I’ve actually met plenty of women who would fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon who do understand typical women, experience difficulties interacting with them, and are sympathetic to male difficulties interacting with these women. A female friend of my mine in college insists that “women are evil.” Another female friend (highly introverted and thing-oriented) once told me that she doesn’t like most women and can’t relate to them; she considers them annoying and full of drama.
I think that controversy about pickup would diminish if PUAs promoted a better model of atypical women, and in turn, atypical women had a better model of the more typical types of women that PUAs encounter most often and base most of their theories on. Women in the minority taxon have a valid complaint that PUAs do not correctly categorize their preferences and persistently overgeneralize. Not only is this bad communication on the part of PUAs and a marginalization of the perspective of these women, it is also PUAs shooting themselves in the foot by failing to understand a group of women that potentially contains compatible long-term mates for them.
PUAs also have a valid complaint that many women in the minority taxon who criticize pickup simply don’t understand what men are dealing with when interacting with gender-typical women. These women are engaging in the “typical mind fallacy,” which marginalizes the perspectives of PUAs on their interactions with most women. It also marginalizes the perspectives of gender-typical women, particularly extraverts, who are less motivated to engage in this sort of discussion on the internet. Ironically, women with majority preferences are probably the least likely to engage in arguments about female preferences on the internet, while women with minority preferences are probably most likely to be interested in such discussions.
When I posted more on PUA forum years ago, I argued for better models of different female personalities, with mixed success. I have a lot more field experience and research now, I am pretty much the only person who has put it all together.
While most PUAs are going out to clubs and meeting women they often have trouble relating to, I almost exclusively date women who would fall into the gender atypical taxon (since I do, too). While intellectually I would like to see PUAs expand their models, it is nice that I experience very little competition in my niche.
You may have no idea how crazy-making it is to keep hearing “we mean well to women” when the version of women described bears no resemblance to oneself. Note that atypical women have a long history (somewhat weakened by feminism) of being told that they should be typical women. And when I say long history, I don’t just mean previous generations, some of it’s still in play. And, while that post about PUAs as trauma survivors straightens out a lot about what’s going on, it seems as though PUA is a bunch of tools for becoming more like typical men which simply make the PUA students’ lives better, being more like typical women has a lot of features which atypical women feel strongly would make their lives worse.
I’m not sure that “thing-oriented” quite covers the range of atypical women. I expect that I’d count as atypical, and I’m more word-oriented. “Not primarily people-oriented” might cover the ground better.
The model PUAs have of women in the gender-atypical minority taxon sucks.
I think that this depends a lot on what you mean by “model”. If you mean their calibration of what specific behaviors (e.g. yelling, being silly, very aggressive, etc.), then yes, I’d agree—it’s calibrated for “club girls” and nightclub environments.
But my observation is that the atyipcal women (whom I’ve pretty much exclusively dated) still respond to what the PUA’s would call dominance traits—just not the same signifiers for those traits. The main difference is that atypicals prefer you to show dominance over things other than them. (Except maybe in the bedroom, given explicit discussion and consent.)
For example, having a purpose and sense of direction in life, knowing what you want, being decisive, etc. are still a factor in atypicals’ attraction algorithm. Intellectual dominance, in the sense of being articulate, knowledgeable, insightful, etc. Not having these qualities tends to get you filtered out.
Atypicals don’t engage in status testing by being jerks (well, maybe some occasional sarcasm); they do it mainly by seeing if you can keep up with them intellectually—can you match them, pun for pun, double entendre for double entendre? Do you get their obscure references?
This is still status testing/flirting, just different.
(Hm, actually, it’s occurring to me that some atypicals I’ve known still had the whole orbiter hierarchy thing going on, and tended to end up sleeping with the highest-dominant jerks in their group… just reasonably intelligent jerks. This behavior pattern seems to be more correlated with whether a woman is found attractive by a lot of guys, rather than whether she’s neurotypical per se.)
Are you going to publish, or at least blog, on this subject? As someone who downplays the importance of gender, I would like to see my assumptions flipped on their head.
It occurs to me that just as there are “naturals” that appeal more to typical women there are likely “naturals” that appeal more to atypical women. I never thought about it before since one usually measures one’s attractiveness on the majority’s terms but I might actually be a natural of the latter type and not have ever realized it until this moment. Strange.
Yet I’ve actually met plenty of women who would fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon who do understand typical women, experience difficulties interacting with them, and are sympathetic to male difficulties interacting with these women. A female friend of my mine in college insists that “women are evil.” Another female friend (highly introverted and thing-oriented) once told me that she doesn’t like most women and can’t relate to them; she considers them annoying and full of drama.
Most of of my female friends fit this category. I can emphasise with what they are saying, I grew up with sisters, after all, and at times didn’t envy them their ‘friends’. Then nature of peer competition is differentiated somewhat between the sexes and the gender-atypical women I know are poorly suited to it. But being male I actually find I have far less of that sort of trouble, given that I am not often a direct competitor. That and I have the opportunity to use innocent flirtation to release some of the competitive tension without zero-sum conflict.
Yup, you are observant. Since poly women have more male-typical sexuality (polyamory, high sociosexuality) and nerdy women have more male-typical interests and psychology, I think I’m justified in locating the hypothesis of an underlying masculinization factor. This masculinization is probably biological (specifically, prenatal… and yes, I do have more research on this). I hypothesize that masculinization or feminization are some of the most important dimensions in personality and interests (which is consistent with mainstream psychology, though a bit non-PC) and I am working on figuring out the practical implications of those dimensions with respect to dating. So far, I’m ahead of the seduction community on this subject.
Your theories and (apparent) research match my own.
As for practical implications of those dimensions, and how they apply to gender atypical people, my understanding is mostly procedural and intuitive abstractions. And my theories are biased towards practical implications for me that, while they look like they could be more generally applicable, may not be. Thinking other people are more similar to ourselves than they are is a typical human failing (right up there next to thinking we’re unique, go figure).
One thing I have noticed is that what is described as ‘masculine and feminine’ sexuality seems to be more than one distinct concept. Some of those ‘polyamorous, nerdy women with male-typical interests and psychology’ execute clearly female instinctive patterns in a masculine way. So a concrete minded person with basic competence from the seduction material would think ‘masculine’, someone with more experience, more curiosity or more IQ may burst out laughing as they see the same patterns play out in an entirely different way. And ya know, while it can be easy to learn the rules which work with the gender-typical stereotype, learning to interact with those with a more distinct psychology is just a whole heap more fun! It’s more ‘real’.
I do hear “treat her like your bratty little sister” sometimes.
In other words, her point of view isn’t relevant—it’s a power relationship.
Is that how you treat your bratty little sister?
The dynamic actually being referred to is a loving relationship where neither party takes the other too seriously, and where “big bro” is expected to look out for and protect “little sis”, including at times possibly taking more care for her safety or long-term goals than she is, while not being moved by the occasional pout or tantrum. It’s also a dynamic where “big bro” tries to live up to his sister’s possibly-idealized image of him as the big strong guy looking out for her.
The purpose of the advice is to evoke an area of a man’s life where he may already have an experience of being a leader/protector to a loved female who he didn’t put on a distant pedestal of awe and fear. Not to put down women.
I’m an older sister. My sister wasn’t a brat, and I wasn’t a bully. I did take a little advantage on housework, and I think she’s still angry about it. However, I never tried to break down her self-respect.
How flexible is the “bratty little sister” model for coverinig situations where the sister is right?
However, I never tried to break down her self-respect.
I’ve never seen anyone advocate breaking down a woman’s self-respect, so I’m not clear on the relevance here either.
How flexible is the “bratty little sister” model for coverinig situations where the sister is right?
Brothers and sisters can disagree, can they not? Sister isn’t required to agree with brother, nor vice versa.
Think of it this way: right now, you appear to think that the problem is that if the guy pushes one way, then she has to go along with that.
Now, reverse the model: pretend that if she pushes one way, the guy has to go along with that.
That’s the mental model most men (AFC’s or Average Frustrated Chumps in PUA lingo) have about relationships.
By default, “nice guys” think they have to agree with everything a woman says. This is especially the case if the woman is attractive to them, and they really want her to like him.
You might not think this is most men’s model… but that’s because most men don’t approach the women they’re attracted to in the first place! And the ones that do, tend to get written off as unattractive or not relationship material, precisely because they’re too eager to please, doing too much, “well, what do you want to do?”, etc.
PUA appears biased the other way, because it’s trying to train AFCs that they need to actually have an opinion of their own, and be able to maintain that opinion even when a woman they’re positively infatuated with disagrees.
Unfortunately, availability bias on the part of women means that you are going to think men are already too far biased this way, because the majority of the ones who come and hit on you in the first place are towards the further end of the wimpy-nice-confident-aggressive-asshole spectrum. PUA training is aimed at moving people at the low end of that scale towards the middle, not the high end off the scale.
In my view, there isn’t enough explicitly stated material on how to detect when the sister is in the right in PUA materials; some of my own thought processes on this subject is shown here. I do think that many experienced PUAs do figure out better intuition about when the sister is being genuinely bratty, whether she is deliberately testing him or simply displaying her natural personality, or if she has some other motive, such as displaying serious objections or resistance to how the interaction is proceeding that require him to adjust his approach or back off entirely.
This process of adjusting one’s behavior based on the woman’s responses is called “calibration,” and it is hard to teach through explicit description (which is why experienced PUAs often roll their eyes at how beginners go through phases of weird or otherwise undesirable behavior until they learn the correct calibration and how to interpret the teachings of the community). Some experienced PUAs will apologize to women if they judge that they have badly “miscalibrated.”
It’s nice to see that PUAs are working on this angle. It’s cheering to think that paying attention to what you’re doing leads to more benevolent behavior.
And it’s very interesting from an FAI angle that calibration isn’t programmatic. I’ve been trying to work up convincing arguments that an FAI will have to do ongoing attention and updating in order to treat people well.
Some experienced PUAs will apologize to women if they judge that they have badly “miscalibrated.”
For anyone who prefers equal relationships (and I’ve seen some happy marriages which look pretty equal), even the experienced PUAs have awful defaults (it takes experience to learn to apologize at all, only some PUAs do it, and it’s only for bad mistakes), and it’s scary to think about the men who haven’t done that much work.
I think one piece of it is a cultural problem (maybe hard-wired, but I hope not) of figuring out how to apologize without it having the effect of grovelling for either person.
For anyone who prefers equal relationships (and I’ve seen some happy marriages which look pretty equal), even the experienced PUAs have awful defaults (it takes experience to learn to apologize at all, only some PUAs do it, and it’s only for bad mistakes), and it’s scary to think about the men who haven’t done that much work.
Yes, it takes newbie PUAs time to learn to recognize when they have made social errors, and to learn which errors are bad enough that they should apologize for. But in this regard, PUAs are just the same as everyone else. They are just learning these social lessons later in life, while most people learned them through their normal socialization in childhood and adolescence.
Trust me, PUAs don’t want to be going through trial-and-error to learn during adulthood what everyone else learned during puberty, but it’s really not their fault that they have to do this. The typical reasons that they have ended up in this situation is because they got locked out of a normal social development by exclusion, bullying, or abuse by peers or parents during their formative development.
Sociologist Brian Gilmartin did a study of men with debilitating shyness in heterosexual interactions in the late 80′s, and found a high rate of peer and/or family victimization experienced by these men during their formative years. Furthermore, he found a high rate of gender-atypical traits in his sample. “Love-shy” men were disproportionately introverted, prone to anxiety, and non-neurotypical. Gilmartin argues that males with those traits may be capable of a positive social development in the right environment, but that American culture is unfriendly to males with these traits:
Let me illustrate with some insights derived from findings reported
in various parts of this book. In American society there is an irrational
albeit near ubiquitous learned tendency on the part of most young adults
to associate the very thought of “boy” with the thought of a natural,
inborn enthusiasm for baseball, football, and basketball. Thus my find-
ings clearly show that those boys who best fit this stereotyped expec-
tation quickly come to possess the strongest interpersonal skills and the
lowest incidence of love-shyness. On the other hand, my data also show
that those boys who fit this stereotype least well include among their
members the highest incidence of intractable love-shyness combined
with a history of inadequate socialization for interpersonal skills and
social self-confidence. Girls without a natural enthusiasm for such rough,
contact sports do not suffer negative outcomes as a result. A liking for
such sports is considered (at best) optional for them, and it is not nor-
matively prescribed as it is for boys.
It is through the cumulative tenor of the responses of others, par-
ticularly parents and peers, that a child decides whether it is intelligent or
stupid, attractive or homely, lovable or unlovable, competent or incom-
petent, worthy of social companionship or worthless in this regard. If
a male child is born in America with an innate temperament that places
him high up in the melancholic quadrant (quadrant #1) of the Eysenck
Cross, and if this native temperament with its concomitants of very low
pain and anxiety thresholds, nervousness and inhibition/introversion,
cause him to constantly avoid the rough and tumble play of the all-male
peer group (and not physically defend himself against its assaults), that
child is highly likely to develop a very low social self-image along with
a case of intractable shyness.
Such a development is NEVER a necessary consequence of such an
inborn temperament. There is nothing intrinsically “unhealthy” about
being an emotional introvert per se. But insofar as within the American
social context such a temperament is likely to serve as a stimulus for
consistent and continual bullying, ignoring and rejection on the part of
the peer group and expressed disappointment and disapproval on the
part of parents (especially fathers), shyness together with a low self-
esteem, a “people-phobia”, and poor interpersonal skills are all highly
likely to develop.
p. 82:
And so it is with the little boy who is high on inborn introversion/ inhibition and high on inborn emotionality. If left alone to the ravages of the conventional all-boy peer group he will almost certainly become love-shy and lonely without the interpersonal skills that are indispensable for effective, happy survival. If, on the other hand, that little boy is introduced to an alternative peer group composed of little boys and girls who are reasonably similar to himself in native temperament and if that little boy is introduced to games and sports that will not frighten him or inspire any sort of bullying, then the chances are exceedingly good that he will be headed for psychoemotional and social adjustment. In fact, as Alexander Thomas has shown, such a little boy’s chances for
success will actually be about as good as those of children who had been
born with more advantaged inborn temperaments.
The social problems described by Gilmartin’s work are on the more extreme end of what many PUAs describe. Yet what it shows is that many PUAs are essentially abuse survivors of various sorts who are currently trying to learn the social skills that they could have learned in adolescence if they hadn’t spent their adolescence being abused, excluded, or isolated due to having non-stereotypically masculine traits or being non-neurotypical.
Does that mean that anything goes in their attempts to “catch up” socially? Of course not. These men should still exercise common sense, and people who are teaching them should encourage it. Yet since the social intuitions of these men are under-developed due their negative developmental experiences, it is inevitable that they will make mistakes. If they played completely safe, they might lower the amount of mistakes they made, but they would miss out on important developmental lessons.
This does make more sense out of PUA. Thank you for posting it.
For anyone who prefers equal relationships (and I’ve seen some happy marriages which look pretty equal), even the experienced PUAs have awful defaults (it takes experience to learn to apologize at all, only some PUAs do it, and it’s only for bad mistakes), and it’s scary to think about the men who haven’t done that much work.
Yes, it takes newbie PUAs time to learn to recognize when they have made social errors, and to learn which errors are bad enough that they should apologize for. But in this regard, PUAs are just the same as everyone else. They are just learning these social lessons later in life, while most people learned them through their normal socialization in childhood and adolescence.
Where you’re putting the emphasis on the end state, I’m seeing a description of men who are barely capable of apologizing at all. I gather PUA is especially for men who feel they ought to be apologizing all the time.
Part of what’s going on here is group loyalty issues. My defaults are the ill-effects on women of harassment and abuse, and yours are men who got pushed to the bottom of the hierarchy. From my point of view, you see women as just the material for you guys to learn on.
You mention that the quotes from the article are the extreme end of what PUAs at the extreme end of what PUAs have experienced. Would you care to give me some idea of the range?
One piece is something which I probably need to work on. It’s very tempting for me to see a creepy guy as really creepy all the way down, so that what seems like more attractive behavior is just a ploy.
I’m willing to bet that PUA generally can’t be framed as trauma recovery because you believe (perhaps rightly) that a man can’t do well socially while admitting to that sort of damage.
I’m wondering if “normal” people need to do this much damage for the sake of their own functioning. Cruelty seems to be strongly reinforcing for a significant proportion of people.
Gilmartin argues that males with those traits may be capable of a positive social development in the right environment, but that American culture is unfriendly to males with these traits:
I came at it from fat acceptance, but it was rather a shock to realize that my native culture is meaner than hell.
I gather PUA is especially for men who feel they ought to be apologizing all the time.
Yes, exactly. This is probably the bit that causes the most problems—women think PUA advocates that all the jerky guys who already bother them become even jerkier, when it’s actually about getting nice guys to stop being apologetic for even existing within the perceptual range of a female.
I’m willing to bet that PUA generally can’t be framed as trauma recovery because you believe (perhaps rightly) that a man can’t do well socially while admitting to that sort of damage.
Right—men are shamed for not being able to deal with it, in the same way that you were shamed for being angry.
That being said, PUA is framed as recovery, to a certain extent, but with a more positive spin—“it’s not about getting women, it’s about becoming better men” is a common saying among people who’ve spent a nontrivial amount of time interacting with their PUA peers, or who’re involved in doing training.
It’s very tempting for me to see a creepy guy as really creepy all the way down, so that what seems like more attractive behavior is just a ploy.
If you look at what PUA training products are for sale in the marketplace, and how they’re priced, you’ll notice that the difference between cheap training and expensive training is mostly about the difference between cheap tricks, and becoming a more confident, expressive, person. (On the in-between pricing levels, there’s training about style, logistics, approaches, etc.)
This isn’t accidental—it reflects the normal path of guys’ interest. The further along someone gets in their education, the more interested they are in changing who they are, rather than in just learning some magical pickup lines, or ways to dress and stand so as not to look creepy.
If you think that PUAs are creepy guys who just want to manipulate women and get laid, consider the fact that they’re willing to pay $200 just to learn to appreciate women better!
Heck, just read the first bullet point from that sales page:
How most guys are strangers to their own emotions, and therefore can’t relate to a woman’s emotions. Discover how to open up to your OWN emotions, and watch your connections with women deepen, immediately.
Does that sound like something that would even remotely appeal to the stereotype you have in mind of what a “PUA” is?
Sure, I’m cherrypicking an example—AMP are the only people I know of who position their marketing that clearly. Most of the sales literature for similar training is shrouded in more mystery, or in language that makes things sound a lot more like you’re going to become this awesome stud, until you look at the actual program synopsis or read reviews
But AMP is far from the only company training “inner”, “natural”, and “direct” game styles (all of which emphasize personal transformation, and open/honest communication). And some of those other companies are making millions. Annually.
Which means it’s not really the narrow niche you think it is. Availability bias and controversy creates distorted views.
In other words, her point of view isn’t relevant—it’s a power relationship.
Power, yes. Her point of view not being relevant? I don’t know, I guess it depends on how you treat your sister.
Remember, the claim of PUAs (who advocate such techniques; not all do) is that a large enough percentage of women responds well to such treatment and enjoy it. You may well be skeptical of that claim. I am skeptical that the percentage is as high as some PUAs make it sound.
If you disagree with the tactic, I suggest that you follow it down to the root and look at the premises, and what reasons PUAs have to believe that women are reasonably likely to enjoy this kind of treatment. If the woman’s sexual preference is to be treated that way, then it’s not treating her point of view as not “revelant,” it the opposite: the PUA is taking into account the woman’s point of view by giving her what she enjoys. Whenever we look at weird and wacky PUA tactics, we really need to be thinking about what responses PUAs have got from women that make them think (correctly or incorrectly) that such behavior is viable and reasonable. We cannot assume that such behavior is primarily driven by their own preferences, or that it merely a jerk-like imposition on the part of PUAs.
The fact that PUAs advocate a certain behavior as attractive to women is sufficient to locate the hypothesis that they might actually be correct, and we should consider that hypothesis along with the hypothesis that PUAs are biased, or that such behavior is an imposition of their own preferences rather than women’s.
I have my own objections to the “bratty little sister” frame, primarily because I want to be dating someone who is an equal. A little teasing is always great, but if I wouldn’t want an interaction with a woman where I persistently felt that my role was too close to the role of a big brother, while her role was too close to that of a bratty little sister. Moreover, I think that many men have this same preference, and so would be best served by forms of seduction that promote equality.
Note that my objection is from my own preferences (and the preferences that I think more people should hold); I think the effectiveness and ethics of such behavior is less clear-cut.
You say “power relationship” like it’s a bad thing. My own preference may be similar to yours in that I dislike persistent and overarching power dynamics in my relationships (and I think that a lot of power dynamics are actively harmful), but lots of people, male and female, really do like relationships with gendered power dynamics, and seem to do just fine in them. As long as these relationships are chosen freely, I don’t have a sufficient basis to say that there is something wrong with the preferences of those people, or with satisfying those preferences.
Tentatively offered, but it’s possible that if PUAs framed their recommended behavior in terms of “some women” or “many women” rather than implying that what they’re doing works well with all women, there’d be a lot less social friction.
This may or may not be something you want, but part of this conversation is why there are so few women at LW.
I would also like to see more rigor in describing the responses of different subsets of women. When PUAs talk among themselves, qualifiers do get to be a drag, even if a PUA has more complex views. I think more rigor would be worth it, and I find the tendency of PUAs to use language with negative implications annoying and socially unintelligent (“social intelligence” is a buzzword in the community).
In this regard, I found your comments elsewhere in the thread quite helpful to my understanding:
and
Similarly, I would suspect that a significant number of the women who post or consider posting here may also be closer in many ways to the 130 IQ thing-oriented male introverts. And not only would these women find objectionable some of the statements by some PUAs (of the sort you highlighted in the quoted paragraph, or even somewhat less extreme examples), but they would find this portion of some PUA terminology/attitudes particularly off-putting in that its portrayal of women appears to not line up at all with many of the traits of these Lesswrong-type women. Indeed a lot of what I have read does not appear to even acknowledge that women of other types exist. To the extent this lack of qualifiers has been imported into the limited discussion of PUA techniques on LW (which I think it has to at least some extent), then this may be part of why the discussion has met with resistance and offense.
Thanks, I’m glad you found my comments useful.
Exactly. We are seeing two relevant categories of women that I will give the following labels to:
“Atypical women.” This category of women has a combination of the following traits: gender-nonconforming, thing-oriented, introverted, non-neurotypical. Highly intelligent people of both genders also tend to be gender-atypical. Women likely to be interested in posting on LW are likely to fall into this category. Feminists, queer women, polyamorous women, kinky women, artists, and nerds also tend to fall into this category. (Feel free to ask why I would group any of those categories of women together.)
“Typical women.” This category of women is more gender-typical and people-oriented.
This division is inspired by Gangestad et al.’s finding that people fit into two taxa: a majority taxon of gender typical people (85%+ of people), and a minority taxon of gender of atypical people (queer people were mostly in this taxon). If anyone is bothered by terms like “atypical women” or “typical women,” bring it up and we’ll talk about the stats.
I would categorize the relationship of these two taxa of females as follows:
The model PUAs have of women in the gender-atypical minority taxon sucks.
The model that many women in the gender-atypical taxon have of other women in the gender-typical taxon, also sucks.
As a result, PUAs and women in the minority taxon often miss each other like ships in the dark, and have fundamentally different experiences in heterosexual interaction, even they have a lot of psychological similarities.
Yet I’ve actually met plenty of women who would fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon who do understand typical women, experience difficulties interacting with them, and are sympathetic to male difficulties interacting with these women. A female friend of my mine in college insists that “women are evil.” Another female friend (highly introverted and thing-oriented) once told me that she doesn’t like most women and can’t relate to them; she considers them annoying and full of drama.
I think that controversy about pickup would diminish if PUAs promoted a better model of atypical women, and in turn, atypical women had a better model of the more typical types of women that PUAs encounter most often and base most of their theories on. Women in the minority taxon have a valid complaint that PUAs do not correctly categorize their preferences and persistently overgeneralize. Not only is this bad communication on the part of PUAs and a marginalization of the perspective of these women, it is also PUAs shooting themselves in the foot by failing to understand a group of women that potentially contains compatible long-term mates for them.
PUAs also have a valid complaint that many women in the minority taxon who criticize pickup simply don’t understand what men are dealing with when interacting with gender-typical women. These women are engaging in the “typical mind fallacy,” which marginalizes the perspectives of PUAs on their interactions with most women. It also marginalizes the perspectives of gender-typical women, particularly extraverts, who are less motivated to engage in this sort of discussion on the internet. Ironically, women with majority preferences are probably the least likely to engage in arguments about female preferences on the internet, while women with minority preferences are probably most likely to be interested in such discussions.
When I posted more on PUA forum years ago, I argued for better models of different female personalities, with mixed success. I have a lot more field experience and research now, I am pretty much the only person who has put it all together.
While most PUAs are going out to clubs and meeting women they often have trouble relating to, I almost exclusively date women who would fall into the gender atypical taxon (since I do, too). While intellectually I would like to see PUAs expand their models, it is nice that I experience very little competition in my niche.
Thank you for working this out..
You may have no idea how crazy-making it is to keep hearing “we mean well to women” when the version of women described bears no resemblance to oneself. Note that atypical women have a long history (somewhat weakened by feminism) of being told that they should be typical women. And when I say long history, I don’t just mean previous generations, some of it’s still in play. And, while that post about PUAs as trauma survivors straightens out a lot about what’s going on, it seems as though PUA is a bunch of tools for becoming more like typical men which simply make the PUA students’ lives better, being more like typical women has a lot of features which atypical women feel strongly would make their lives worse.
I’m not sure that “thing-oriented” quite covers the range of atypical women. I expect that I’d count as atypical, and I’m more word-oriented. “Not primarily people-oriented” might cover the ground better.
I think that this depends a lot on what you mean by “model”. If you mean their calibration of what specific behaviors (e.g. yelling, being silly, very aggressive, etc.), then yes, I’d agree—it’s calibrated for “club girls” and nightclub environments.
But my observation is that the atyipcal women (whom I’ve pretty much exclusively dated) still respond to what the PUA’s would call dominance traits—just not the same signifiers for those traits. The main difference is that atypicals prefer you to show dominance over things other than them. (Except maybe in the bedroom, given explicit discussion and consent.)
For example, having a purpose and sense of direction in life, knowing what you want, being decisive, etc. are still a factor in atypicals’ attraction algorithm. Intellectual dominance, in the sense of being articulate, knowledgeable, insightful, etc. Not having these qualities tends to get you filtered out.
Atypicals don’t engage in status testing by being jerks (well, maybe some occasional sarcasm); they do it mainly by seeing if you can keep up with them intellectually—can you match them, pun for pun, double entendre for double entendre? Do you get their obscure references?
This is still status testing/flirting, just different.
(Hm, actually, it’s occurring to me that some atypicals I’ve known still had the whole orbiter hierarchy thing going on, and tended to end up sleeping with the highest-dominant jerks in their group… just reasonably intelligent jerks. This behavior pattern seems to be more correlated with whether a woman is found attractive by a lot of guys, rather than whether she’s neurotypical per se.)
Are you going to publish, or at least blog, on this subject? As someone who downplays the importance of gender, I would like to see my assumptions flipped on their head.
You could probably make a living off that.
It occurs to me that just as there are “naturals” that appeal more to typical women there are likely “naturals” that appeal more to atypical women. I never thought about it before since one usually measures one’s attractiveness on the majority’s terms but I might actually be a natural of the latter type and not have ever realized it until this moment. Strange.
I hadn’t thought of it in that way either, but I think you may be right.
Most of of my female friends fit this category. I can emphasise with what they are saying, I grew up with sisters, after all, and at times didn’t envy them their ‘friends’. Then nature of peer competition is differentiated somewhat between the sexes and the gender-atypical women I know are poorly suited to it. But being male I actually find I have far less of that sort of trouble, given that I am not often a direct competitor. That and I have the opportunity to use innocent flirtation to release some of the competitive tension without zero-sum conflict.
For that pair I’d be going with the whole ‘being strongly correlated’ thing.
Yup, you are observant. Since poly women have more male-typical sexuality (polyamory, high sociosexuality) and nerdy women have more male-typical interests and psychology, I think I’m justified in locating the hypothesis of an underlying masculinization factor. This masculinization is probably biological (specifically, prenatal… and yes, I do have more research on this). I hypothesize that masculinization or feminization are some of the most important dimensions in personality and interests (which is consistent with mainstream psychology, though a bit non-PC) and I am working on figuring out the practical implications of those dimensions with respect to dating. So far, I’m ahead of the seduction community on this subject.
Your theories and (apparent) research match my own.
As for practical implications of those dimensions, and how they apply to gender atypical people, my understanding is mostly procedural and intuitive abstractions. And my theories are biased towards practical implications for me that, while they look like they could be more generally applicable, may not be. Thinking other people are more similar to ourselves than they are is a typical human failing (right up there next to thinking we’re unique, go figure).
One thing I have noticed is that what is described as ‘masculine and feminine’ sexuality seems to be more than one distinct concept. Some of those ‘polyamorous, nerdy women with male-typical interests and psychology’ execute clearly female instinctive patterns in a masculine way. So a concrete minded person with basic competence from the seduction material would think ‘masculine’, someone with more experience, more curiosity or more IQ may burst out laughing as they see the same patterns play out in an entirely different way. And ya know, while it can be easy to learn the rules which work with the gender-typical stereotype, learning to interact with those with a more distinct psychology is just a whole heap more fun! It’s more ‘real’.
I rather doubt that. It is my impression that there are more female commenters on popular PUA blogs than there are here.
Is that how you treat your bratty little sister?
The dynamic actually being referred to is a loving relationship where neither party takes the other too seriously, and where “big bro” is expected to look out for and protect “little sis”, including at times possibly taking more care for her safety or long-term goals than she is, while not being moved by the occasional pout or tantrum. It’s also a dynamic where “big bro” tries to live up to his sister’s possibly-idealized image of him as the big strong guy looking out for her.
The purpose of the advice is to evoke an area of a man’s life where he may already have an experience of being a leader/protector to a loved female who he didn’t put on a distant pedestal of awe and fear. Not to put down women.
I’m an older sister. My sister wasn’t a brat, and I wasn’t a bully. I did take a little advantage on housework, and I think she’s still angry about it. However, I never tried to break down her self-respect.
How flexible is the “bratty little sister” model for coverinig situations where the sister is right?
What does bullying have to do with it?
I’ve never seen anyone advocate breaking down a woman’s self-respect, so I’m not clear on the relevance here either.
Brothers and sisters can disagree, can they not? Sister isn’t required to agree with brother, nor vice versa.
Think of it this way: right now, you appear to think that the problem is that if the guy pushes one way, then she has to go along with that.
Now, reverse the model: pretend that if she pushes one way, the guy has to go along with that.
That’s the mental model most men (AFC’s or Average Frustrated Chumps in PUA lingo) have about relationships.
By default, “nice guys” think they have to agree with everything a woman says. This is especially the case if the woman is attractive to them, and they really want her to like him.
You might not think this is most men’s model… but that’s because most men don’t approach the women they’re attracted to in the first place! And the ones that do, tend to get written off as unattractive or not relationship material, precisely because they’re too eager to please, doing too much, “well, what do you want to do?”, etc.
PUA appears biased the other way, because it’s trying to train AFCs that they need to actually have an opinion of their own, and be able to maintain that opinion even when a woman they’re positively infatuated with disagrees.
Unfortunately, availability bias on the part of women means that you are going to think men are already too far biased this way, because the majority of the ones who come and hit on you in the first place are towards the further end of the wimpy-nice-confident-aggressive-asshole spectrum. PUA training is aimed at moving people at the low end of that scale towards the middle, not the high end off the scale.
In my view, there isn’t enough explicitly stated material on how to detect when the sister is in the right in PUA materials; some of my own thought processes on this subject is shown here. I do think that many experienced PUAs do figure out better intuition about when the sister is being genuinely bratty, whether she is deliberately testing him or simply displaying her natural personality, or if she has some other motive, such as displaying serious objections or resistance to how the interaction is proceeding that require him to adjust his approach or back off entirely.
This process of adjusting one’s behavior based on the woman’s responses is called “calibration,” and it is hard to teach through explicit description (which is why experienced PUAs often roll their eyes at how beginners go through phases of weird or otherwise undesirable behavior until they learn the correct calibration and how to interpret the teachings of the community). Some experienced PUAs will apologize to women if they judge that they have badly “miscalibrated.”
It’s nice to see that PUAs are working on this angle. It’s cheering to think that paying attention to what you’re doing leads to more benevolent behavior.
And it’s very interesting from an FAI angle that calibration isn’t programmatic. I’ve been trying to work up convincing arguments that an FAI will have to do ongoing attention and updating in order to treat people well.
For anyone who prefers equal relationships (and I’ve seen some happy marriages which look pretty equal), even the experienced PUAs have awful defaults (it takes experience to learn to apologize at all, only some PUAs do it, and it’s only for bad mistakes), and it’s scary to think about the men who haven’t done that much work.
I think one piece of it is a cultural problem (maybe hard-wired, but I hope not) of figuring out how to apologize without it having the effect of grovelling for either person.
Yes, it takes newbie PUAs time to learn to recognize when they have made social errors, and to learn which errors are bad enough that they should apologize for. But in this regard, PUAs are just the same as everyone else. They are just learning these social lessons later in life, while most people learned them through their normal socialization in childhood and adolescence.
Trust me, PUAs don’t want to be going through trial-and-error to learn during adulthood what everyone else learned during puberty, but it’s really not their fault that they have to do this. The typical reasons that they have ended up in this situation is because they got locked out of a normal social development by exclusion, bullying, or abuse by peers or parents during their formative development.
Sociologist Brian Gilmartin did a study of men with debilitating shyness in heterosexual interactions in the late 80′s, and found a high rate of peer and/or family victimization experienced by these men during their formative years. Furthermore, he found a high rate of gender-atypical traits in his sample. “Love-shy” men were disproportionately introverted, prone to anxiety, and non-neurotypical. Gilmartin argues that males with those traits may be capable of a positive social development in the right environment, but that American culture is unfriendly to males with these traits:
p. 46-47 of his book (available as PDF here ):
p. 82:
The social problems described by Gilmartin’s work are on the more extreme end of what many PUAs describe. Yet what it shows is that many PUAs are essentially abuse survivors of various sorts who are currently trying to learn the social skills that they could have learned in adolescence if they hadn’t spent their adolescence being abused, excluded, or isolated due to having non-stereotypically masculine traits or being non-neurotypical.
Does that mean that anything goes in their attempts to “catch up” socially? Of course not. These men should still exercise common sense, and people who are teaching them should encourage it. Yet since the social intuitions of these men are under-developed due their negative developmental experiences, it is inevitable that they will make mistakes. If they played completely safe, they might lower the amount of mistakes they made, but they would miss out on important developmental lessons.
This does make more sense out of PUA. Thank you for posting it.
Where you’re putting the emphasis on the end state, I’m seeing a description of men who are barely capable of apologizing at all. I gather PUA is especially for men who feel they ought to be apologizing all the time.
Part of what’s going on here is group loyalty issues. My defaults are the ill-effects on women of harassment and abuse, and yours are men who got pushed to the bottom of the hierarchy. From my point of view, you see women as just the material for you guys to learn on.
You mention that the quotes from the article are the extreme end of what PUAs at the extreme end of what PUAs have experienced. Would you care to give me some idea of the range?
One piece is something which I probably need to work on. It’s very tempting for me to see a creepy guy as really creepy all the way down, so that what seems like more attractive behavior is just a ploy.
I’m willing to bet that PUA generally can’t be framed as trauma recovery because you believe (perhaps rightly) that a man can’t do well socially while admitting to that sort of damage.
I’m wondering if “normal” people need to do this much damage for the sake of their own functioning. Cruelty seems to be strongly reinforcing for a significant proportion of people.
I came at it from fat acceptance, but it was rather a shock to realize that my native culture is meaner than hell.
Yes, exactly. This is probably the bit that causes the most problems—women think PUA advocates that all the jerky guys who already bother them become even jerkier, when it’s actually about getting nice guys to stop being apologetic for even existing within the perceptual range of a female.
Right—men are shamed for not being able to deal with it, in the same way that you were shamed for being angry.
That being said, PUA is framed as recovery, to a certain extent, but with a more positive spin—“it’s not about getting women, it’s about becoming better men” is a common saying among people who’ve spent a nontrivial amount of time interacting with their PUA peers, or who’re involved in doing training.
If you look at what PUA training products are for sale in the marketplace, and how they’re priced, you’ll notice that the difference between cheap training and expensive training is mostly about the difference between cheap tricks, and becoming a more confident, expressive, person. (On the in-between pricing levels, there’s training about style, logistics, approaches, etc.)
This isn’t accidental—it reflects the normal path of guys’ interest. The further along someone gets in their education, the more interested they are in changing who they are, rather than in just learning some magical pickup lines, or ways to dress and stand so as not to look creepy.
If you think that PUAs are creepy guys who just want to manipulate women and get laid, consider the fact that they’re willing to pay $200 just to learn to appreciate women better!
Heck, just read the first bullet point from that sales page:
Does that sound like something that would even remotely appeal to the stereotype you have in mind of what a “PUA” is?
Sure, I’m cherrypicking an example—AMP are the only people I know of who position their marketing that clearly. Most of the sales literature for similar training is shrouded in more mystery, or in language that makes things sound a lot more like you’re going to become this awesome stud, until you look at the actual program synopsis or read reviews
But AMP is far from the only company training “inner”, “natural”, and “direct” game styles (all of which emphasize personal transformation, and open/honest communication). And some of those other companies are making millions. Annually.
Which means it’s not really the narrow niche you think it is. Availability bias and controversy creates distorted views.