Eliezer, I think you’re spot on here. I think objectification is both exclusion from the dialogue and being relegated to the status of an object, but I hadn’t considered the first aspect to it before.
The PUA dialogue as a whole is unpleasant for me, as a woman, exactly because women are implicitly excluded as agents. I am bisexual and I would like it if more women were interested in me, so one would think PUA might be of interest. But PUA excludes me completely and alienates me. When I read about it, I realise with a horrified fascination that I am reading instructions for someone else on how to hack MY BRAIN for their own personal gratification.
Being “objectified” in the sense of being relegated to the status of an object implies that one neither needs nor deserves autonomy or agency. A person willing to employ pickup artistry or similar is revealing their opinion that women do not deserve full agency and/or the chance to make informed decisions in this arena, purely because the Artist disagrees with their probable decision. I believe that’s why I and so many other women find PUA repulsive: it is an attempt to control us and dilute our autonomy.
And for the record, I am really interested in evolutionary psychology and don’t understand how it could be offensive. It doesn’t attempt to exclude or disempower any group to my knowledge—am I wrong? From my reading on the matter, it is simply one scientific approach attempting to explain and predict human behaviour.
A person willing to employ pickup artistry or similar is revealing their opinion that women do not deserve full agency and/or the chance to make informed decisions in this arena, purely because the Artist disagrees with their probable decision.
Is a person willing to take a class on public speaking revealing their opinion that audiences do not deserve full agency or the chance to make informed decisions about what they’re presenting in a speech? Should they not practice to make the best possible impression?
I realize there are schools of PUA that are based on trickery. However, the “direct”, “natural”, and “inner” schools of PUA studies deal only with what makes men more attractive to women, generally. That information is unlikely to be useful to you as a bisexual woman, but it is certainly not about treating women as objects. Some teachers (most notably Johnny Soporno) are quite explicitly about emancipating women from oppressive societal constructs around sexuality (such as the idea that having sex with more than one partner means a woman has no self-worth).
Still other teachers (e.g. Juggler) teach men how to make emotional connections in conversation—to reveal themselves better and to learn more about a woman than just “what do you do” type chitchat. And others (e.g. Tyler of RSD) emphasize learning how to provide a woman with a safe space and positive energy. (I know that sounds kind of woo-woo, but actually explaining it in a reductionist way would take way more time and space than I want to spend here.)
None of these things are any more offensive or objectifying to women than public speaking classes are to audiences. They’re teaching men to be better men, not how to “control” women.
I have no problem with attempting to make oneself more attractive to other people or make the best possible impression. When you make a speech to a lot of people, of course you should practice it—but nobody in the audience thinks that you got up and ad-libbed it, just like nobody who sees me dressed up thinks I’m always going to look like that. We realise we’re seeing your best effort, which acts as a signal of your valuation of the event or activity—we don’t think that you’re always like this, and the self enhancement is common knowledge.
Pick up artists are different. Let’s break them into two groups: the outright tricksters and the “inner” school. We can agree, unless i’m very much mistaken, that the tricksters are clearly attempting to hack women’s brains (ie with the little psychological games to make them look insightful or deep, with use of negging, etc) in an unethical way. Mystery is a good example of this. By “hack” I mean “influence in an underhanded way without permission”—if for example you managed to convince me PUA is good, you didn’t hack my brain, you changed my mind.
But the inner school is also problematic, and I think you misrepresented them. I have no problem with people trying to teach other people to be more attentive, more able to reveal themselves, more considerate. This is purely optimising yourself rather than attempting to optimise the other person. But the inner school still includes techniques to optimise/hack the woman, for example the systems of how to touch women casually so that they “feel safe” or ways to elicit “indications of interest” from women. I don’t see how that’s any different from the tricksters. For example, Juggler says: “You can figure out what IOIs you want and then ‘trick’ or command them from girls. ” He even says men should “Tell her to sit with the proper posture” or get “her” to “accept your commands” by starting small and then building up. (http://www.bristollair.com/outer-game/techniques/tactics/forcing-iois.html)
To me the inner school is fundamentally the same as the tricksters, except it adds in a component of self-optimising as well as the manipulation of the woman—that makes it less wrong but certainly not right.
Let’s break them into two groups: the outright tricksters and the “inner” school. We can agree, unless i’m very much mistaken, that the tricksters are clearly attempting to hack women’s brains (ie with the little psychological games to make them look insightful or deep, with use of negging, etc) in an unethical way. Mystery is a good example of this
Agreed. Ross Jeffries and Mystery both explicitly belong to this school. However, the general trend in successful schools has been moving progressively further and further away from these approaches. Indeed, even Mystery is viewable as a step away from Jeffries’ position—arguably most of the Mystery Method can be compared to a generalized pattern for “how to give a speech”—i.e., this is the order of steps that people go through in becoming attracted to one another, so this is the order in which you should do things. You can discard all of the specific problematic techniques at each stage, and just use the stages themselves.
In fact, this is what the RSD people do—the company formed from the feud between Mystery and certain of his Project Hollywood brethren. They kept the logistics, and substitute what might simplistically be called “confidence” for the use of canned material and tricks. The RSD people have famously claimed that any statement, no matter how ridiculous, can be used to start a conversation, if used with the right attitude. And one of their examples is, “I like salad!”
Clearly, this is not some sort of underhanded mind hack.
It seems to me that, in general, the direction of larger PUA schools since Mystery is increasingly away from the direction of “tricks”, and for various economic/marketing reasons (which I won’t bore you with here), I expect this trend to continue. But in addition to those business reasons, there’s a deeper reason as well.
In one workshop video excerpt I saw, a teacher told a story about his first attempt at pickup, after having read some stupid poem on the internet that was supposed to be a magic pickup line or something. Only, being young and gullible, he totally and utterly believed it would work. So he went to the nearest bar, went straight to the best-looking woman in the room, and used it… and it worked.
Not because it was magic. But because he believed it would work, and therefore gave off all the attractive signals of a man with complete confidence in himself.
So, what’s been happening is that there’s an increasing realization among the teachers that, really, there are only two things to teach: confidence, and the details. (Where details might be compared to stage management, planning & prep., and improvisation skills in relation to public speaking.)
In practice, I’m also using the word “confidence” to cover a broad spectrum of ideas such as frame control, nonreactivity, positive state and projections, self-image, etc.
But the inner school still includes techniques to optimise/hack the woman, for example the systems of how to touch women casually so that they “feel safe”
Surely you’d want to know how not to touch someone in an offputting way, or to convey a degree of interest that you didn’t mean to? I guess I’m confused how learning to touch in a courteous way constitutes “hacking”.
I don’t see how that’s any different from the tricksters. For example, Juggler says: “You can figure out what IOIs you want and then ‘trick’ or command them from girls.” He even says men should “Tell her to sit with the proper posture” or get “her” to “accept your commands” by starting small and then building up.
The public speaker gets up in front of an audience, and says, “How’s everybody doing tonight?” No responses. Louder: “How’s everybody doing tonight?”, and gets some response. Later, the speaker asks how many people are local/from out of town, asks them to raise their hands.
By the speed of the responses, the speaker knows whether his audience is responding to his message. Also, by making them do things, the speaker is asking for a greater commitment to and involvement with whatever message is being presented.
However, this is not “hacking” the audience. If somebody is not open to what is being said, they’re gonna sit there with folded hands and their mouth shut, no matter what the speaker says or asks. The speaker’s actions may increase the response of audience members who are at least minimally responsive, but their minds are hardly being hacked! If it were possible to really hack minds in this way, seminar speakers would make considerably more money than they already do. ;-)
These types of responsiveness requests are mainly useful for measuring the temperature of an interaction, and prompting a move to the next stage of an interaction that’s already going well. They can’t be used to create something that isn’t already there, which is why public speakers can’t just give people a bunch of commands to raise their hands or stand up or sit down or clap, as a simple lead up to saying, “now go to the back of the room and give me all your money.”
Do you really think that even the most devious PUA tricks have any more mind hacking power than this? I don’t. And my general impression is that the skilled PUAs and teachers don’t expect any of these tricks to do the work for them; having showmanship or salesmanship is not really a substitute for having something worth showing or selling.
To me the inner school is fundamentally the same as the tricksters, except it adds in a component of self-optimising as well as the manipulation of the woman—that makes it less wrong but certainly not right.
Well, since I haven’t taken any classes from any of these people, I can’t absolutely refute this with any certainty. But my understanding is that, for example, RSD’s “Blueprint Decoded” workshop consists of four days of nothing but self-improvement, as do the Double Your Dating “Man Transformation”, “Deep Inner Game”, and “On Being A Man” workshop products. So, there are definitely guys out there wanting to buy stuff that’s only inner game and has nothing to do with manipulating anybody (or the DYD people sure as heck wouldn’t have made three high-end products on the topic!).
Now, whether the products match the way they’re promoted, I couldn’t say. But I think it’s interesting, the shifts in marketing that have taken place over the years, and I think it reflects an increasing understanding that while many guys will buy tricks, what a large percentage of them really want, is just to be someone who’s comfortable around attractive women, and doesn’t put them off in a hundred tiny ways they don’t even realize they’re doing.
I think this is a worthwhile thing, and I assume you do as well.
We both think it’s a good thing if men want to learn about how to be more considerate, more confident, and more comfortable around women – you were right to assume I agree here. I have no problem with your examples; in fact, I can tell you now I would probably respond well if a guy started a conversation with me about salad in a confident way. :D
You and I disagree about the extent to which the PUAs are teaching people that. You say that they are, and I believe your examples, but most of the sites I can find are all about sequences, “running game”, tricks, mind games, strategies, etc. They rank women from 1 to 10 and advise different techniques. So many of the websites I am seeing talk about women as though they’re objects, not people—and simplistic, easily hackable objects at that. Press button X, the man is assured, and she is likely to respond with Y. I went back to look at them for the purposes at this discussion and I feel revolted all over again. The Mystery Method for example explicitly advises stimulating positive AND negative emotions in a woman, specifically jealousy and frustration, because that makes her emotionally vulnerable to male advances! Do you agree this is highly objectionable?
We also disagree about the touching example. This isn’t about touching in a “courteous way”, this is about touching in a strategic way in order to get her to let her guard down, and to trust you, or even to subconsciously conform to your wishes (ie firm hand on the small of the back). That’s a hack.
The third thing I want to address is your public speaking example. As I said before, this differs from PUA because everyone realises what is going on. The artifice is on the surface – if a public speaker convinces me of something, it is with my permission. The PUArtist intends to hide the artifice, to convince a woman to sleep with him or lust after him without her realising he is using mind tricks to do it. The hiding of the artifice is not always successful, but that doesn’t matter: the problem here is the intention to deceive, the intention to trick a woman into feeling something. That’s why the PUA tricks have more mind-hacking power than asking an audience how they’re feeling or to raise their hands: the participant is not supposed to be aware they’re being played, so their guard against it is unlikely to be as strong.
but most of the sites I can find are all about sequences, “running game”, tricks, mind games, strategies, etc.
Yeah, I don’t read most of those sites. As I said, it certainly can be considered selection or availability bias on my part.
However, that being said, I must reject the idea that “PUA is bad” because some or even most PUA are bad. If most women have some disliked property X, it would be just as wrong for me to attribute property X to “women”.
So many of the websites I am seeing talk about women as though they’re objects, not people—and simplistic, easily hackable objects at that. Press button X, the man is assured, and she is likely to respond with Y.
Seriously, doesn’t virtually every book in the “relationships” section of a bookstore (not to mention Cosmo) do just the same with men?
If one of those books says, “Men need X in order to give you Y, so be sure to give them X”, how is this actually any different?
In truth, it isn’t. Many men prefer to use language that sounds like they have control or mastery over a situation, and many women prefer language that sounds like they are caring or giving in the same situation.
And, this language difference is independent of the person’s behavior. There are women who can read that relationship book and use what they find to make men miserable, and those who want to know because they care.
Same thing with men: there are those who learn PUA to get back at women and society, and there are those who genuinely want to relate better. And for the latter men, the language may or may not be a barrier. I personally relate better to materials that are about “this is what she needs/wants” rather than “this is what button to push”, but usually even the button-pushers (among the professional trainers) will include some info about the need/want side of things.
The Mystery Method for example explicitly advises stimulating positive AND negative emotions in a woman, specifically jealousy and frustration, because that makes her emotionally vulnerable to male advances! Do you agree this is highly objectionable?
My impression is that the jealousy and frustration here is very mild, on a very playful level. After all, we are talking about two people who’ve just met a few minutes ago. If someone experiences real jealousy or frustration from a few minutes of Mystery’s antics, I suspect they would not be able to handle a normal relationship very well… and not just with him!
For the rest of your comment, I think HughRistik has done a good job of addressing your points. The touch issue, for example, falls under the heading of, “so… it’s okay if somebody does it without thinking, but if they do it on purpose, it’s somehow bad?” And likewise, if we are not to have any artifice at all, then should we all go out to the clubs unwashed and unkempt, since that’s what we look like when we get out of bed in the morning?
And there isn’t a single one of these things that isn’t matched in one way or another by the advice given to women. Heck, the Double Your Dating guy actually has a product out now for women called “Catch Him And Keep Him”, for women to game men with.
Heck, you want to talk about mind hacking… the marketing for Catch Him and Keep Him has far, far more female mind hacking in it than any PUA material I have ever seen. Fortunately for you, it will probably not work on a female rationalist who isn’t insecure about relationships—it is specifically targeted at typical fears and insecurities about men.
Of course, that gets back to the question: if you make something that will actually help that insecure woman, is it “evil mind hacking” to tell her what you have and what it will do for her?
And if a guy actually has good qualities, is it wrong for him to advertise them?
More to the point, if the thing a woman happens to want from a guy is a positive experience, then how is it manipulation for him to give her that positive experience, whatever it consists of? Confidence, touch… or even jealousy, intrigue, and drama.
(To say that “a lot of women like drama” would be an understatement of both “a lot” and “like”.)
They rank women from 1 to 10 and advise different techniques.
Yes. The rating system is controversial in the community, and many PUAs refuse to use it exactly because they see it as objectifying. The reason that it probably sticks around is that it happens to be useful: a woman’s conventional attractiveness is a factor in how she has been treated by men, and the physiological effect she has on the PUA, both of which are highly relevant.
As I said before, this differs from PUA because everyone realises what is going on.
Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?
The PUArtist intends to hide the artifice,
Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.
to convince a woman to sleep with him or lust after him without her realising he is using mind tricks to do it.
The problem I have with the term “mind tricks” is that a lot of these behaviors are isomorphic to social behaviors shown by men who are naturally successful with women (which is not to say that I don’t have a problem with some techniques, see below). The neg, and cocky/funny for instance. It seems counter-intuitive to hold that these behaviors are OK if you don’t realize you are doing them, but not OK if you know how they work. Of course, you might see the neg as bad either way, in which case it sounds like the main problem you have is with the effects of the technique, not its covert nature.
And indeed, I also have a problem with the neg. I think that the potential benefits it provides don’t outweigh the potential discomfort or insult it can cause to the woman. Or though it might in some contexts, there are better ways to get the same interest without risking hurting her feelings. I think the seduction community as a whole is coming around to this view. Mystery had them believing that negs were practically necessary on highly attractive women in clubs, but eventually people discovered that there were other ways to get their foot in the door, so the neg could no longer be justified on the grounds of virtual necessity.
Part of the issue is that, even when the hurt is minimal, it’s a decision that one’s own self-interest outweighs the harm to someone else, and as humans we’re not very good at making that calculation objectively.
Hi jfpbookworm, long time no see. I agree with skepticism when making decisions over whether one’s self-interest outweighs harm to someone else, which is why in this post I advocated weighing in the potential benefit to the other party also (emphasis added):
I think what we should really be asking is: is the technique harmful, can the user of the technique reasonably be expected to know that, and can any potential harm be justified by potential benefits to the recipient of the technique?
I think I came by this way of thinking from reading Mane Hajdin’s The Law of Sexual Harassment. He wrote an article in this book that has some relevant comments (read page 297-299, though we don’t get 298 in the preview):
We base our decisions on comparing the expected social utility of a practice (the magnitude of the benefits multiplied by the probability of their occurrence) with the expected social disutility or the expected social cost (the magnitude of the harms multiplied by the probability of their occurrence).
[...]
For at least some crude or aggressive advances we will have to conclude that the magnitude of the harm, multiplied by its probability, is so great that the advances in question are worthwhile, and that it may be desirable to have rules that prohibit them.
[...]
Moreover, in determining whether sexual advances of a particular kind would be worthwhile we need to compare the making of such advances not only with not making any advances, but also with making other kinds of advances that can be made under the circumstances.
He then sets up three hypothetical advances:
10% chance of success, 88% chance of mild annoyance, 2% chance of offense
10% success, 89% mild annoyance, 1% offense
11% success, 69% mild annoyance, 20% offense
He says that advances #2 is obvious preferable to advance #1. As for advance #3, the relevant question to ask is:
whether the additional 1 percent probability of success justifies the additional 19 percent probability of offense. If the answer to that question is “no,” as it may well be (that depends on the precise intensity of the offense), then we may want to discourage people from making advances of this third type and encourage them to make the advances that are less risky instead. This is exactly analogous to the reasoning that leads us to impose speed limits on motor traffic.
When pickup artists think about ethics, I suspect this is the kind of implicit moral framework they are using. Of course, all of these calculations have subjective factors, but they are better than nothing.
I’m glad to hear the 1-10 scale is out of favour. I don’t care how useful it is. :)
“Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?”
When a guy comes up to me, no, I don’t know how to instantly differentiate a nice guy who wants to make conversation with me from a “nice” guy who wants to subtly insult me to make me emotionally vulnerable.
“Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.”
On reflection, I’m not against all hidden artifice – as I said in my other reply to you, and this I think is also clear from the comment you’re responding to now, what I don’t like is the hidden attempt to directly influence the other person. If a person chooses to act such that the other person is completely unaware that actions are being performed on them, and these actions can substantially influence their behaviour, I think that is morally problematic.
So, Ido see the neg as bad either way! That behaviour is wrong whether you are taught to do it by Mystery, or you were just born with the innate ability to put women down to further your own gratification. It’s also covert either way, the only way I would consider it non-convert is if a guy came up to a woman and said “would you mind if I subtly put you down?”. Other seduction techniques are overt: “Can I buy you a drink?” “Can we go somewhere more private?”. Those are fine. I’m not asking for super awkward overtness—there’s a set of social conventions people have in place to avoid that (ie “do you want to come up for coffee”) and the conventions are common knowledge. But I definitely find the clear harm more objectionable than the covertness—I do still object to the covertness, as I explained in the previous paragraph.
Possibly it would be easier if we had one thread going so either in your next reply or my next reply perhaps we could try to combine both.
Rachael, I think you raise some excellent questions about the ethics of social influence.
By “hack” I mean “influence in an underhanded way without permission”
Could you explain this without using loaded terms so I can understand exactly what your objection is? I’m glad you try to unpack “hack” as “influence in an underhanded way without permission”, but “underhanded” is still a loaded term!
My best guess is that you’re saying that it’s unethical to intentionally use a tactic of social influence that the other person doesn’t understand and hasn’t granted permission for. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)
I would agree that such behavior is often creepy or distasteful, but I think calling it unethical would have results that are counter to our intuitions. Does it imply that if the other person knew what you were doing, then it would be OK? Or that if you didn’t know you were influencing them, it would be OK? Let’s look at an example from the feminine behavioral repertoire: push-up bras. Are these a hack into the male mind? Some males probably don’t know what push-up bras are, or what their effect is, so they are being influenced by that “tactic” without their knowledge or permission.
To avoid potentially banning large swathes of male and female mating behavior, I think we really have to look at the content of social influence techniques, not just at who knows how it works and who doesn’t. I think what we should really be asking is: is the technique harmful, can the user of the technique reasonably be expected to know that, and can any potential harm be justified by potential benefits to the recipient of the technique? Are there any similar techniques out there that can accomplish the same result with less risk of harm?
When looking at pickup techniques, I think we would see a whole gamut of answers to those questions.
I think you’re right that we have to look at the harm and good of influence tactics. That probably would help us separate, say, wearing push up bras and learning how to be attentive and confident around women, from learning to put women down or make them feel negative emotions so they’re more vulnerable to you.
I do think the permission aspect is still important, though, because otherwise it smacks of a kind of paternalistic approach – the male judges what’s good for everyone and then executes it, without checking with the woman if this is what she thinks is good too. Sort of “I should trick her into liking me because I’m a really swell guy, so it would be better for her if she liked me!” Because in relationships between people a lot of things are subjective and personal, this is an area where it’s reasonable that rational people’s estimations of what’s good and bad will differ.
I don’t think permission is an issue when you’re self-optimising. So I don’t think it matters if men secretly take courses to be more confident and comfortable around women, or if women secretly wear push-up bras. I think it’s important when you’re trying to directly influence the other person, like with the PUA mind games and strategies for producing emotional vulnerability.
Unpacking “hack” more is difficult, I guess “underhanded” would be “using a technique that is deceptive, dishonest, and potentially harmful”. Except now I brought harm back into it so I’m not sure if that helps at all. I do think a hack has to be a direct influence on the other person, not an indirect influence, so that the self-optimising never counts as a hack. I realise the line between direct and indirect is difficult to draw here and it could take us a while to figure it out (if we felt so inclined.)
I’ll probably need to do a couple posts to properly reply to you, but I like your idea of consolidating them into one thread. For others’ reference, I’m also replying to this post by Rachael.
I definitely find the clear harm more objectionable than the covertness—I do still object to the covertness, as I explained in the previous paragraph.
I do think we can say that if a form of influence is harmful and covert, then the covertness makes it worse. Trying to harm someone sneakily is worse than trying to harm them overtly.
I still have trouble with banning covert methods of influence, merely for being covert, even direct influence. That’s why I brought up the example of the push-up bra. It’s not self-optimization, it’s deception, and it’s a direct attempt to effect male sexual psychology in a way that can “substantially influence” their behavior. To say that it is ethical suggests that certain types of deception can be justified.
The use of covert influence techniques raises a question: if the person it was being used on found out later, how would they feel?
In the case of push-up bras, I think the intuition is that if/when a man finds out about the covert technique, he will/should consider it justified, or at least excusable, if he understood the challenges women go through in satisfying men’s sexual preferences for looks. Likewise, the intuition around a PUA a technique may be that if women discovered it, they would or should consider it to be justified, or at least excusable, if they understood the challenges men go through in satisfying women’s sexual preferences (e.g. for masculine traits, and see the Draco In Leather Pants TV Trope for some less-empirical but more humorous examples of the dark side of female preferences). Furthermore, in both cases, the intuition may be that once the other person’s stereotypical sexual preference is satisfied (e.g. looks for men, or masculinity for women), and they actually get to know the other person, they might be less concerned about the other sex using using a bit of deception to get their foot in the door.
The level of deception typically involved in pickup techniques is much lower than the push-bra, because PUAs are actually trying to embody traits that are attractive to women. When pickup artists are “faking” things, the faking is merely a temporary phase in the process of “fake it til’ you make it.” Probably the worst type of male deception for females is when males are deceptive about their relationship interest or availability. Yet PUAs advocate avoiding false promises of relationship interest, and are often explicitly upfront about what they are looking for, which is one of the ways that PUA behavior is actually more ethical than certain normal male behaviors.
To the extent that PUAs practice deception, it’s less like being wolves in sheeps’ clothing, and more like being sheep in wolves’ clothing. If a woman finds out that the seemingly-badboy PUA she is dating is really a sweetheart inside, how bad actually is that? Many women would probably be thrilled.
I do agree with you that using influence tactics when the other person isn’t aware of is morally problematic, even though I don’t see selectively banning them from dating-challenged men to be an easy solution for multiple reasons that I might get into in the future. Consequently, I want to see full transparency for social influence, particularly mating-related social influence in society. I tell women I date for any length of time about the seduction community, in a level of detail that depends on how interested they seem in the subject. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ll also talk the ear off of anyone who seems interested in the subject with an open mind.
In a future post, I want to address the ethics of potentially harmful social influence, the ethics of exposing other people to risks, and whether or not these can be justified by believing oneself to be a “swell guy.”
None of these things are any more offensive or objectifying to women than public speaking classes are to audiences.
Not that I’m arguing a normative point here, but I’ve always gotten the same negative vibe from public speaking classes (and rhetoric) as from marketing/PUA. But then, I’ve often been known to disregard relevant social skills.
I had the same reaction of revulsion to PUA sites until I realized it only works when I let it, and I suspect the same for most women.
PUAs work in singles bars and other places where single people go to interact with other single people. Girls go to these places when they want sexual attention; IE when they want to be picked-up. Sure there are accompanying reasons like drinking and dancing, but a woman who wants to avoid getting hacked by these techiniques has the very simple option of just not exposing herself to them.
If one of these “artists” hit on you when you are not in a receptive frame of mind, wouldn’t you just reject him? I certainly do. When you are in a receptive frame of mind, it is of course different, and that is when the PUA-stuff can hack you, so to speak, into accepting the advances of someone you’d otherwise reject.
That is not to say these guys can just point a finger at you in the street and Bang.
Long story short, he can’t deny you agency unless you are already objectifying yourself.
When you are in a receptive frame of mind, it is of course different, and that is when the PUA-stuff can hack you, so to speak, into accepting the advances of someone you’d otherwise reject.
If someone offers you a tasty dessert when you’re hungry, is that “hacking” your mind, because you otherwise wouldn’t choose to eat it?
If I’m in a bakery, they can hardly be blamed for offering me a cupcake.
If I don’t want the sweets, it is on me to avoid sellers of desserts.
if I’m in a music store and someone offers me a dessert, I’m going to go “WTF” and leave before the weirdo with the candy starts doing something even weirder.
My point is about the “hacking” part, not where the thing is being offered.
Let me rephrase. If a person deliberately sets out to make a tastier dessert, so that it’s more attractive than competing desserts, how is this “hacking” anyone’s mind? If it’s more attractive, then it’s more attractive!
One can argue about whether it might be better from a health or finanical perspective to skip the dessert. One can even say that it’s rude to offer a person some dessert in an inappropriate context. But none of these things have to do with how the dessert tastes, or the quality of ingredients used, or the presentation of the dessert on the plate.
If the baker doesn’t lie about what’s in the dessert, and has gone to extra trouble to procure the finest ingredients, and make the best possible presentation...
And if you choose that dessert because of these things, is that “hacking” your mind? Or just someone offering you a nice dessert?
Your earlier comment implied that someone is “hacking” your mind, when all they’ve actually done is try their best to offer you a nice dessert. Whether you choose to indulge or not is still an essentially free choice, just like we are all free to turn down an actual dessert, no matter how tempting to our palates it may be.
It seems wrong (to me) to imply that using better ingredients or presentation of a dish somehow equals reaching out into someone’s brain and taking control of it. If it were, then we could turn around and argue that men have no control when they see an attractive woman… and I don’t think any of us like where that kind of thinking takes us (e.g. burqas, to say the very least).
(Footnote: is this comment insensitive to Muslims? I’m going to have to guess that religion is the one reasonably-safe whipping boy on LW, at least for the moment.)
Well no, -making- a more attractive dessert is not in any way hacking. PUA techniques that rely on maximising the man’s attractiveness to women are not hacking her brain, they are life-hacks for him. These are not the techniques likely to be objected to, methinks.
I think the improving-the-product aspect is eminently laudable. Self improvement is good.
What does count as hacking is more along the lines of this:
To push the bakery example; I do not like caramel, but let’s say I go to a bakery intending to buy a banana muffin, but the charming presentation of fresh baked caramel ones, along with some tactics by the bakery employees, convince to buy a caramel muffin just this once.
The tactics of presentation and salesmanship have effectively hacked my brain into going for a lower-order preference.
It would take one amazing hack to make me eat a caramel muffin when I’m not hungry and not in a bakery, one that I suspect is not acheivable. I can say no to banana muffins, too.
I don’t mean to say that all PUA technique is fakery and salesmanship; rather I think that the sales-based portions are the ones that horrify women.
Given that I don’t find salesmanship horrifying when buying food or anything else, I’ve stopped finding descriptions of PUA work horrifying.
I don’t mean to say that all PUA technique is fakery and salesmanship; rather I think that the sales-based portions are the ones that horrify women.
In all fairness, the consequences of choosing a bad “dessert” are probably much worse in the singles’ bar than in the bakery, so I can certainly empathize with an intuitive horror of being “sold” something you don’t really want in that context.
Given that I don’t find salesmanship horrifying when buying food or anything else, I’ve stopped finding descriptions of PUA work horrifying.
Thanks for listening and being open-minded. I appreciate it.
All three situations are roughly equivalent, in that someone is offered something that they are currently primed to accept for some reason, but that they would reject normally in a typical mental state.
Many people seem to consider this ethically dubious, especially when the one offering has participated in priming the offeree to be receptive.
Sex, dessert, and cigarettes are “roughly equivalent”? Remind me not to come over to your house for dinner. ;-)
Edit to add: Wow, some people have no sense of humor. Or at least were unable to see past the humor to the actual point. That is, that it stretches the analogy too far to equate “emotionally complicated” and “fattening” with a dependency-forming drug that will then proceed to give you cancer and kill you. Bit of a negative applause light, eh?
Interesting thought. I’ve never been to a “singles bar” or similar place, I think, and I wonder if the divide here was between people who go to such places, and people who do not.
I can’t understand your position. There are people who seem to reliably be able to (in a sense) “hack” women’s minds … and you don’t want to know about it? Wouldn’t you want to be aware of when you are tricked into wanting something that goes against your interest?
ETA: I’m male, and I felt the same revulsion at PUA discussions, but decided that it’s all the more reason to learn about them.
I see I didn’t make myself clear on this one, sorry. I do want to know about it, and indeed I spent some time researching it when I first found out about it. But I find any discussion of it in the context of possibly trying to use it on women, or any attempt to optimise the process to that end, to be repulsive. I don’t want to be in an environment where it is considered acceptable. I’m not against discussing it per se, I am against discussing it as an acceptable/admirable course of action or in a positive light.
Eliezer, I think you’re spot on here. I think objectification is both exclusion from the dialogue and being relegated to the status of an object, but I hadn’t considered the first aspect to it before.
The PUA dialogue as a whole is unpleasant for me, as a woman, exactly because women are implicitly excluded as agents. I am bisexual and I would like it if more women were interested in me, so one would think PUA might be of interest. But PUA excludes me completely and alienates me. When I read about it, I realise with a horrified fascination that I am reading instructions for someone else on how to hack MY BRAIN for their own personal gratification.
Being “objectified” in the sense of being relegated to the status of an object implies that one neither needs nor deserves autonomy or agency. A person willing to employ pickup artistry or similar is revealing their opinion that women do not deserve full agency and/or the chance to make informed decisions in this arena, purely because the Artist disagrees with their probable decision. I believe that’s why I and so many other women find PUA repulsive: it is an attempt to control us and dilute our autonomy.
And for the record, I am really interested in evolutionary psychology and don’t understand how it could be offensive. It doesn’t attempt to exclude or disempower any group to my knowledge—am I wrong? From my reading on the matter, it is simply one scientific approach attempting to explain and predict human behaviour.
(edited for clarity)
Is a person willing to take a class on public speaking revealing their opinion that audiences do not deserve full agency or the chance to make informed decisions about what they’re presenting in a speech? Should they not practice to make the best possible impression?
I realize there are schools of PUA that are based on trickery. However, the “direct”, “natural”, and “inner” schools of PUA studies deal only with what makes men more attractive to women, generally. That information is unlikely to be useful to you as a bisexual woman, but it is certainly not about treating women as objects. Some teachers (most notably Johnny Soporno) are quite explicitly about emancipating women from oppressive societal constructs around sexuality (such as the idea that having sex with more than one partner means a woman has no self-worth).
Still other teachers (e.g. Juggler) teach men how to make emotional connections in conversation—to reveal themselves better and to learn more about a woman than just “what do you do” type chitchat. And others (e.g. Tyler of RSD) emphasize learning how to provide a woman with a safe space and positive energy. (I know that sounds kind of woo-woo, but actually explaining it in a reductionist way would take way more time and space than I want to spend here.)
None of these things are any more offensive or objectifying to women than public speaking classes are to audiences. They’re teaching men to be better men, not how to “control” women.
I have no problem with attempting to make oneself more attractive to other people or make the best possible impression. When you make a speech to a lot of people, of course you should practice it—but nobody in the audience thinks that you got up and ad-libbed it, just like nobody who sees me dressed up thinks I’m always going to look like that. We realise we’re seeing your best effort, which acts as a signal of your valuation of the event or activity—we don’t think that you’re always like this, and the self enhancement is common knowledge.
Pick up artists are different. Let’s break them into two groups: the outright tricksters and the “inner” school. We can agree, unless i’m very much mistaken, that the tricksters are clearly attempting to hack women’s brains (ie with the little psychological games to make them look insightful or deep, with use of negging, etc) in an unethical way. Mystery is a good example of this. By “hack” I mean “influence in an underhanded way without permission”—if for example you managed to convince me PUA is good, you didn’t hack my brain, you changed my mind.
But the inner school is also problematic, and I think you misrepresented them. I have no problem with people trying to teach other people to be more attentive, more able to reveal themselves, more considerate. This is purely optimising yourself rather than attempting to optimise the other person. But the inner school still includes techniques to optimise/hack the woman, for example the systems of how to touch women casually so that they “feel safe” or ways to elicit “indications of interest” from women. I don’t see how that’s any different from the tricksters. For example, Juggler says: “You can figure out what IOIs you want and then ‘trick’ or command them from girls. ” He even says men should “Tell her to sit with the proper posture” or get “her” to “accept your commands” by starting small and then building up. (http://www.bristollair.com/outer-game/techniques/tactics/forcing-iois.html)
To me the inner school is fundamentally the same as the tricksters, except it adds in a component of self-optimising as well as the manipulation of the woman—that makes it less wrong but certainly not right.
Agreed. Ross Jeffries and Mystery both explicitly belong to this school. However, the general trend in successful schools has been moving progressively further and further away from these approaches. Indeed, even Mystery is viewable as a step away from Jeffries’ position—arguably most of the Mystery Method can be compared to a generalized pattern for “how to give a speech”—i.e., this is the order of steps that people go through in becoming attracted to one another, so this is the order in which you should do things. You can discard all of the specific problematic techniques at each stage, and just use the stages themselves.
In fact, this is what the RSD people do—the company formed from the feud between Mystery and certain of his Project Hollywood brethren. They kept the logistics, and substitute what might simplistically be called “confidence” for the use of canned material and tricks. The RSD people have famously claimed that any statement, no matter how ridiculous, can be used to start a conversation, if used with the right attitude. And one of their examples is, “I like salad!”
Clearly, this is not some sort of underhanded mind hack.
It seems to me that, in general, the direction of larger PUA schools since Mystery is increasingly away from the direction of “tricks”, and for various economic/marketing reasons (which I won’t bore you with here), I expect this trend to continue. But in addition to those business reasons, there’s a deeper reason as well.
In one workshop video excerpt I saw, a teacher told a story about his first attempt at pickup, after having read some stupid poem on the internet that was supposed to be a magic pickup line or something. Only, being young and gullible, he totally and utterly believed it would work. So he went to the nearest bar, went straight to the best-looking woman in the room, and used it… and it worked.
Not because it was magic. But because he believed it would work, and therefore gave off all the attractive signals of a man with complete confidence in himself.
So, what’s been happening is that there’s an increasing realization among the teachers that, really, there are only two things to teach: confidence, and the details. (Where details might be compared to stage management, planning & prep., and improvisation skills in relation to public speaking.)
In practice, I’m also using the word “confidence” to cover a broad spectrum of ideas such as frame control, nonreactivity, positive state and projections, self-image, etc.
Surely you’d want to know how not to touch someone in an offputting way, or to convey a degree of interest that you didn’t mean to? I guess I’m confused how learning to touch in a courteous way constitutes “hacking”.
The public speaker gets up in front of an audience, and says, “How’s everybody doing tonight?” No responses. Louder: “How’s everybody doing tonight?”, and gets some response. Later, the speaker asks how many people are local/from out of town, asks them to raise their hands.
By the speed of the responses, the speaker knows whether his audience is responding to his message. Also, by making them do things, the speaker is asking for a greater commitment to and involvement with whatever message is being presented.
However, this is not “hacking” the audience. If somebody is not open to what is being said, they’re gonna sit there with folded hands and their mouth shut, no matter what the speaker says or asks. The speaker’s actions may increase the response of audience members who are at least minimally responsive, but their minds are hardly being hacked! If it were possible to really hack minds in this way, seminar speakers would make considerably more money than they already do. ;-)
These types of responsiveness requests are mainly useful for measuring the temperature of an interaction, and prompting a move to the next stage of an interaction that’s already going well. They can’t be used to create something that isn’t already there, which is why public speakers can’t just give people a bunch of commands to raise their hands or stand up or sit down or clap, as a simple lead up to saying, “now go to the back of the room and give me all your money.”
Do you really think that even the most devious PUA tricks have any more mind hacking power than this? I don’t. And my general impression is that the skilled PUAs and teachers don’t expect any of these tricks to do the work for them; having showmanship or salesmanship is not really a substitute for having something worth showing or selling.
Well, since I haven’t taken any classes from any of these people, I can’t absolutely refute this with any certainty. But my understanding is that, for example, RSD’s “Blueprint Decoded” workshop consists of four days of nothing but self-improvement, as do the Double Your Dating “Man Transformation”, “Deep Inner Game”, and “On Being A Man” workshop products. So, there are definitely guys out there wanting to buy stuff that’s only inner game and has nothing to do with manipulating anybody (or the DYD people sure as heck wouldn’t have made three high-end products on the topic!).
Now, whether the products match the way they’re promoted, I couldn’t say. But I think it’s interesting, the shifts in marketing that have taken place over the years, and I think it reflects an increasing understanding that while many guys will buy tricks, what a large percentage of them really want, is just to be someone who’s comfortable around attractive women, and doesn’t put them off in a hundred tiny ways they don’t even realize they’re doing.
I think this is a worthwhile thing, and I assume you do as well.
We both think it’s a good thing if men want to learn about how to be more considerate, more confident, and more comfortable around women – you were right to assume I agree here. I have no problem with your examples; in fact, I can tell you now I would probably respond well if a guy started a conversation with me about salad in a confident way. :D
You and I disagree about the extent to which the PUAs are teaching people that. You say that they are, and I believe your examples, but most of the sites I can find are all about sequences, “running game”, tricks, mind games, strategies, etc. They rank women from 1 to 10 and advise different techniques. So many of the websites I am seeing talk about women as though they’re objects, not people—and simplistic, easily hackable objects at that. Press button X, the man is assured, and she is likely to respond with Y. I went back to look at them for the purposes at this discussion and I feel revolted all over again. The Mystery Method for example explicitly advises stimulating positive AND negative emotions in a woman, specifically jealousy and frustration, because that makes her emotionally vulnerable to male advances! Do you agree this is highly objectionable?
We also disagree about the touching example. This isn’t about touching in a “courteous way”, this is about touching in a strategic way in order to get her to let her guard down, and to trust you, or even to subconsciously conform to your wishes (ie firm hand on the small of the back). That’s a hack.
The third thing I want to address is your public speaking example. As I said before, this differs from PUA because everyone realises what is going on. The artifice is on the surface – if a public speaker convinces me of something, it is with my permission. The PUArtist intends to hide the artifice, to convince a woman to sleep with him or lust after him without her realising he is using mind tricks to do it. The hiding of the artifice is not always successful, but that doesn’t matter: the problem here is the intention to deceive, the intention to trick a woman into feeling something. That’s why the PUA tricks have more mind-hacking power than asking an audience how they’re feeling or to raise their hands: the participant is not supposed to be aware they’re being played, so their guard against it is unlikely to be as strong.
Yeah, I don’t read most of those sites. As I said, it certainly can be considered selection or availability bias on my part.
However, that being said, I must reject the idea that “PUA is bad” because some or even most PUA are bad. If most women have some disliked property X, it would be just as wrong for me to attribute property X to “women”.
Seriously, doesn’t virtually every book in the “relationships” section of a bookstore (not to mention Cosmo) do just the same with men?
If one of those books says, “Men need X in order to give you Y, so be sure to give them X”, how is this actually any different?
In truth, it isn’t. Many men prefer to use language that sounds like they have control or mastery over a situation, and many women prefer language that sounds like they are caring or giving in the same situation.
And, this language difference is independent of the person’s behavior. There are women who can read that relationship book and use what they find to make men miserable, and those who want to know because they care.
Same thing with men: there are those who learn PUA to get back at women and society, and there are those who genuinely want to relate better. And for the latter men, the language may or may not be a barrier. I personally relate better to materials that are about “this is what she needs/wants” rather than “this is what button to push”, but usually even the button-pushers (among the professional trainers) will include some info about the need/want side of things.
My impression is that the jealousy and frustration here is very mild, on a very playful level. After all, we are talking about two people who’ve just met a few minutes ago. If someone experiences real jealousy or frustration from a few minutes of Mystery’s antics, I suspect they would not be able to handle a normal relationship very well… and not just with him!
For the rest of your comment, I think HughRistik has done a good job of addressing your points. The touch issue, for example, falls under the heading of, “so… it’s okay if somebody does it without thinking, but if they do it on purpose, it’s somehow bad?” And likewise, if we are not to have any artifice at all, then should we all go out to the clubs unwashed and unkempt, since that’s what we look like when we get out of bed in the morning?
And there isn’t a single one of these things that isn’t matched in one way or another by the advice given to women. Heck, the Double Your Dating guy actually has a product out now for women called “Catch Him And Keep Him”, for women to game men with.
Heck, you want to talk about mind hacking… the marketing for Catch Him and Keep Him has far, far more female mind hacking in it than any PUA material I have ever seen. Fortunately for you, it will probably not work on a female rationalist who isn’t insecure about relationships—it is specifically targeted at typical fears and insecurities about men.
Of course, that gets back to the question: if you make something that will actually help that insecure woman, is it “evil mind hacking” to tell her what you have and what it will do for her?
And if a guy actually has good qualities, is it wrong for him to advertise them?
More to the point, if the thing a woman happens to want from a guy is a positive experience, then how is it manipulation for him to give her that positive experience, whatever it consists of? Confidence, touch… or even jealousy, intrigue, and drama.
(To say that “a lot of women like drama” would be an understatement of both “a lot” and “like”.)
Yes. The rating system is controversial in the community, and many PUAs refuse to use it exactly because they see it as objectifying. The reason that it probably sticks around is that it happens to be useful: a woman’s conventional attractiveness is a factor in how she has been treated by men, and the physiological effect she has on the PUA, both of which are highly relevant.
Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?
Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.
The problem I have with the term “mind tricks” is that a lot of these behaviors are isomorphic to social behaviors shown by men who are naturally successful with women (which is not to say that I don’t have a problem with some techniques, see below). The neg, and cocky/funny for instance. It seems counter-intuitive to hold that these behaviors are OK if you don’t realize you are doing them, but not OK if you know how they work. Of course, you might see the neg as bad either way, in which case it sounds like the main problem you have is with the effects of the technique, not its covert nature.
And indeed, I also have a problem with the neg. I think that the potential benefits it provides don’t outweigh the potential discomfort or insult it can cause to the woman. Or though it might in some contexts, there are better ways to get the same interest without risking hurting her feelings. I think the seduction community as a whole is coming around to this view. Mystery had them believing that negs were practically necessary on highly attractive women in clubs, but eventually people discovered that there were other ways to get their foot in the door, so the neg could no longer be justified on the grounds of virtual necessity.
The neg can simply be more on the teasing side than on the insulting side. I don’t think teasing is all that objectionable.
Part of the issue is that, even when the hurt is minimal, it’s a decision that one’s own self-interest outweighs the harm to someone else, and as humans we’re not very good at making that calculation objectively.
Exactly, thank you.
Hi jfpbookworm, long time no see. I agree with skepticism when making decisions over whether one’s self-interest outweighs harm to someone else, which is why in this post I advocated weighing in the potential benefit to the other party also (emphasis added):
I think I came by this way of thinking from reading Mane Hajdin’s The Law of Sexual Harassment. He wrote an article in this book that has some relevant comments (read page 297-299, though we don’t get 298 in the preview):
He then sets up three hypothetical advances:
10% chance of success, 88% chance of mild annoyance, 2% chance of offense
10% success, 89% mild annoyance, 1% offense
11% success, 69% mild annoyance, 20% offense
He says that advances #2 is obvious preferable to advance #1. As for advance #3, the relevant question to ask is:
When pickup artists think about ethics, I suspect this is the kind of implicit moral framework they are using. Of course, all of these calculations have subjective factors, but they are better than nothing.
I’m glad to hear the 1-10 scale is out of favour. I don’t care how useful it is. :)
“Do women not realize what is going on when a strange guy approaches them?”
When a guy comes up to me, no, I don’t know how to instantly differentiate a nice guy who wants to make conversation with me from a “nice” guy who wants to subtly insult me to make me emotionally vulnerable.
“Are you against all hidden artifices in dating (including female artifices)? Or just some particular types of artifice? If the latter, what distinguishes the artifices that you find objectionable? The moral standards you are advocating seem potentially over-broad to me.”
On reflection, I’m not against all hidden artifice – as I said in my other reply to you, and this I think is also clear from the comment you’re responding to now, what I don’t like is the hidden attempt to directly influence the other person. If a person chooses to act such that the other person is completely unaware that actions are being performed on them, and these actions can substantially influence their behaviour, I think that is morally problematic.
So, Ido see the neg as bad either way! That behaviour is wrong whether you are taught to do it by Mystery, or you were just born with the innate ability to put women down to further your own gratification. It’s also covert either way, the only way I would consider it non-convert is if a guy came up to a woman and said “would you mind if I subtly put you down?”. Other seduction techniques are overt: “Can I buy you a drink?” “Can we go somewhere more private?”. Those are fine. I’m not asking for super awkward overtness—there’s a set of social conventions people have in place to avoid that (ie “do you want to come up for coffee”) and the conventions are common knowledge. But I definitely find the clear harm more objectionable than the covertness—I do still object to the covertness, as I explained in the previous paragraph.
Possibly it would be easier if we had one thread going so either in your next reply or my next reply perhaps we could try to combine both.
Rachael, I think you raise some excellent questions about the ethics of social influence.
Could you explain this without using loaded terms so I can understand exactly what your objection is? I’m glad you try to unpack “hack” as “influence in an underhanded way without permission”, but “underhanded” is still a loaded term!
My best guess is that you’re saying that it’s unethical to intentionally use a tactic of social influence that the other person doesn’t understand and hasn’t granted permission for. (Please correct me if I’m wrong.)
I would agree that such behavior is often creepy or distasteful, but I think calling it unethical would have results that are counter to our intuitions. Does it imply that if the other person knew what you were doing, then it would be OK? Or that if you didn’t know you were influencing them, it would be OK? Let’s look at an example from the feminine behavioral repertoire: push-up bras. Are these a hack into the male mind? Some males probably don’t know what push-up bras are, or what their effect is, so they are being influenced by that “tactic” without their knowledge or permission.
To avoid potentially banning large swathes of male and female mating behavior, I think we really have to look at the content of social influence techniques, not just at who knows how it works and who doesn’t. I think what we should really be asking is: is the technique harmful, can the user of the technique reasonably be expected to know that, and can any potential harm be justified by potential benefits to the recipient of the technique? Are there any similar techniques out there that can accomplish the same result with less risk of harm?
When looking at pickup techniques, I think we would see a whole gamut of answers to those questions.
I think you’re right that we have to look at the harm and good of influence tactics. That probably would help us separate, say, wearing push up bras and learning how to be attentive and confident around women, from learning to put women down or make them feel negative emotions so they’re more vulnerable to you.
I do think the permission aspect is still important, though, because otherwise it smacks of a kind of paternalistic approach – the male judges what’s good for everyone and then executes it, without checking with the woman if this is what she thinks is good too. Sort of “I should trick her into liking me because I’m a really swell guy, so it would be better for her if she liked me!” Because in relationships between people a lot of things are subjective and personal, this is an area where it’s reasonable that rational people’s estimations of what’s good and bad will differ.
I don’t think permission is an issue when you’re self-optimising. So I don’t think it matters if men secretly take courses to be more confident and comfortable around women, or if women secretly wear push-up bras. I think it’s important when you’re trying to directly influence the other person, like with the PUA mind games and strategies for producing emotional vulnerability.
Unpacking “hack” more is difficult, I guess “underhanded” would be “using a technique that is deceptive, dishonest, and potentially harmful”. Except now I brought harm back into it so I’m not sure if that helps at all. I do think a hack has to be a direct influence on the other person, not an indirect influence, so that the self-optimising never counts as a hack. I realise the line between direct and indirect is difficult to draw here and it could take us a while to figure it out (if we felt so inclined.)
I’ll probably need to do a couple posts to properly reply to you, but I like your idea of consolidating them into one thread. For others’ reference, I’m also replying to this post by Rachael.
I do think we can say that if a form of influence is harmful and covert, then the covertness makes it worse. Trying to harm someone sneakily is worse than trying to harm them overtly.
I still have trouble with banning covert methods of influence, merely for being covert, even direct influence. That’s why I brought up the example of the push-up bra. It’s not self-optimization, it’s deception, and it’s a direct attempt to effect male sexual psychology in a way that can “substantially influence” their behavior. To say that it is ethical suggests that certain types of deception can be justified.
The use of covert influence techniques raises a question: if the person it was being used on found out later, how would they feel?
In the case of push-up bras, I think the intuition is that if/when a man finds out about the covert technique, he will/should consider it justified, or at least excusable, if he understood the challenges women go through in satisfying men’s sexual preferences for looks. Likewise, the intuition around a PUA a technique may be that if women discovered it, they would or should consider it to be justified, or at least excusable, if they understood the challenges men go through in satisfying women’s sexual preferences (e.g. for masculine traits, and see the Draco In Leather Pants TV Trope for some less-empirical but more humorous examples of the dark side of female preferences). Furthermore, in both cases, the intuition may be that once the other person’s stereotypical sexual preference is satisfied (e.g. looks for men, or masculinity for women), and they actually get to know the other person, they might be less concerned about the other sex using using a bit of deception to get their foot in the door.
The level of deception typically involved in pickup techniques is much lower than the push-bra, because PUAs are actually trying to embody traits that are attractive to women. When pickup artists are “faking” things, the faking is merely a temporary phase in the process of “fake it til’ you make it.” Probably the worst type of male deception for females is when males are deceptive about their relationship interest or availability. Yet PUAs advocate avoiding false promises of relationship interest, and are often explicitly upfront about what they are looking for, which is one of the ways that PUA behavior is actually more ethical than certain normal male behaviors.
To the extent that PUAs practice deception, it’s less like being wolves in sheeps’ clothing, and more like being sheep in wolves’ clothing. If a woman finds out that the seemingly-badboy PUA she is dating is really a sweetheart inside, how bad actually is that? Many women would probably be thrilled.
I do agree with you that using influence tactics when the other person isn’t aware of is morally problematic, even though I don’t see selectively banning them from dating-challenged men to be an easy solution for multiple reasons that I might get into in the future. Consequently, I want to see full transparency for social influence, particularly mating-related social influence in society. I tell women I date for any length of time about the seduction community, in a level of detail that depends on how interested they seem in the subject. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ll also talk the ear off of anyone who seems interested in the subject with an open mind.
In a future post, I want to address the ethics of potentially harmful social influence, the ethics of exposing other people to risks, and whether or not these can be justified by believing oneself to be a “swell guy.”
Not that I’m arguing a normative point here, but I’ve always gotten the same negative vibe from public speaking classes (and rhetoric) as from marketing/PUA. But then, I’ve often been known to disregard relevant social skills.
I had the same reaction of revulsion to PUA sites until I realized it only works when I let it, and I suspect the same for most women.
PUAs work in singles bars and other places where single people go to interact with other single people. Girls go to these places when they want sexual attention; IE when they want to be picked-up. Sure there are accompanying reasons like drinking and dancing, but a woman who wants to avoid getting hacked by these techiniques has the very simple option of just not exposing herself to them.
If one of these “artists” hit on you when you are not in a receptive frame of mind, wouldn’t you just reject him? I certainly do. When you are in a receptive frame of mind, it is of course different, and that is when the PUA-stuff can hack you, so to speak, into accepting the advances of someone you’d otherwise reject. That is not to say these guys can just point a finger at you in the street and Bang.
Long story short, he can’t deny you agency unless you are already objectifying yourself.
If someone offers you a tasty dessert when you’re hungry, is that “hacking” your mind, because you otherwise wouldn’t choose to eat it?
If I’m in a bakery, they can hardly be blamed for offering me a cupcake. If I don’t want the sweets, it is on me to avoid sellers of desserts. if I’m in a music store and someone offers me a dessert, I’m going to go “WTF” and leave before the weirdo with the candy starts doing something even weirder.
My point is about the “hacking” part, not where the thing is being offered.
Let me rephrase. If a person deliberately sets out to make a tastier dessert, so that it’s more attractive than competing desserts, how is this “hacking” anyone’s mind? If it’s more attractive, then it’s more attractive!
One can argue about whether it might be better from a health or finanical perspective to skip the dessert. One can even say that it’s rude to offer a person some dessert in an inappropriate context. But none of these things have to do with how the dessert tastes, or the quality of ingredients used, or the presentation of the dessert on the plate.
If the baker doesn’t lie about what’s in the dessert, and has gone to extra trouble to procure the finest ingredients, and make the best possible presentation...
And if you choose that dessert because of these things, is that “hacking” your mind? Or just someone offering you a nice dessert?
Your earlier comment implied that someone is “hacking” your mind, when all they’ve actually done is try their best to offer you a nice dessert. Whether you choose to indulge or not is still an essentially free choice, just like we are all free to turn down an actual dessert, no matter how tempting to our palates it may be.
It seems wrong (to me) to imply that using better ingredients or presentation of a dish somehow equals reaching out into someone’s brain and taking control of it. If it were, then we could turn around and argue that men have no control when they see an attractive woman… and I don’t think any of us like where that kind of thinking takes us (e.g. burqas, to say the very least).
(Footnote: is this comment insensitive to Muslims? I’m going to have to guess that religion is the one reasonably-safe whipping boy on LW, at least for the moment.)
I see.
Well no, -making- a more attractive dessert is not in any way hacking. PUA techniques that rely on maximising the man’s attractiveness to women are not hacking her brain, they are life-hacks for him. These are not the techniques likely to be objected to, methinks.
I think the improving-the-product aspect is eminently laudable. Self improvement is good.
What does count as hacking is more along the lines of this: To push the bakery example; I do not like caramel, but let’s say I go to a bakery intending to buy a banana muffin, but the charming presentation of fresh baked caramel ones, along with some tactics by the bakery employees, convince to buy a caramel muffin just this once.
The tactics of presentation and salesmanship have effectively hacked my brain into going for a lower-order preference.
It would take one amazing hack to make me eat a caramel muffin when I’m not hungry and not in a bakery, one that I suspect is not acheivable. I can say no to banana muffins, too.
I don’t mean to say that all PUA technique is fakery and salesmanship; rather I think that the sales-based portions are the ones that horrify women.
Given that I don’t find salesmanship horrifying when buying food or anything else, I’ve stopped finding descriptions of PUA work horrifying.
In all fairness, the consequences of choosing a bad “dessert” are probably much worse in the singles’ bar than in the bakery, so I can certainly empathize with an intuitive horror of being “sold” something you don’t really want in that context.
Thanks for listening and being open-minded. I appreciate it.
If someone who is trying to quit smoking complains about a craving, and you offer them a cigarette, are you doing them a favor?
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the connection.
All three situations are roughly equivalent, in that someone is offered something that they are currently primed to accept for some reason, but that they would reject normally in a typical mental state.
Many people seem to consider this ethically dubious, especially when the one offering has participated in priming the offeree to be receptive.
Sex, dessert, and cigarettes are “roughly equivalent”? Remind me not to come over to your house for dinner. ;-)
Edit to add: Wow, some people have no sense of humor. Or at least were unable to see past the humor to the actual point. That is, that it stretches the analogy too far to equate “emotionally complicated” and “fattening” with a dependency-forming drug that will then proceed to give you cancer and kill you. Bit of a negative applause light, eh?
Interesting thought. I’ve never been to a “singles bar” or similar place, I think, and I wonder if the divide here was between people who go to such places, and people who do not.
I can’t understand your position. There are people who seem to reliably be able to (in a sense) “hack” women’s minds … and you don’t want to know about it? Wouldn’t you want to be aware of when you are tricked into wanting something that goes against your interest?
ETA: I’m male, and I felt the same revulsion at PUA discussions, but decided that it’s all the more reason to learn about them.
I see I didn’t make myself clear on this one, sorry. I do want to know about it, and indeed I spent some time researching it when I first found out about it. But I find any discussion of it in the context of possibly trying to use it on women, or any attempt to optimise the process to that end, to be repulsive. I don’t want to be in an environment where it is considered acceptable. I’m not against discussing it per se, I am against discussing it as an acceptable/admirable course of action or in a positive light.