Ahh, I see and I share your loathing of that kind of niceness.
It took me a while to work out how you were relating this to pickup arts—because I associate the kind of behaviors that rely on exploiting weak boundaries (and in particular exploiting them) to get sex with manipulative ‘nice guys’ and not pickup artists. Pickup arts are more or less all targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness. Not out of any ideological purity but simply because they are targeted at gendter typical women with high self esteem who, approximately by how those terms are defined in the culture, are emphatically not nice when it comes to sex. Manipulative ‘nice guys’ on the other hand notorious for being masters at throwing around feelings of guilt and obligation.
That said, I can see how PUAs could be frustrating or even threatening to women who do not appreciate sexual persistence.
Bizarrely, my initial reaction to your post was to feel tired and angry—that’s why I took some time to chill. I think what was going on at my end might have been effort shock—it’s hard work to be clear and reasonable when I’m trying to explain something that has me frightened and angry to people who don’t seem to have any understanding of what I’m talking about, and kind of shocking that it took that much work to get to a moderate amount of understanding. You may be feeling the same way some of the time.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and I’m wondering how you distinguish between women who have weak boundaries and those who don’t.
And also whether you guys have anything about noticing if a woman is trying to signal that she’s attracted to you. I’m not saying it’s the most common thing, but I’ve heard enough from both men and women about that sort of signal failing that I don’t think it’s totally rare.
More generally, it bothers that you make claims that PUA is a net gain for women when there hasn’t been (and probably can’t be) a way to really check on the total effect.
The funny thing is that it’s been quite a while since I figured out that women typically get much more sexual attention than they want [1], and men typically get much less, and that this leads to drastic difficulties in mutual comprehension. That was the abstraction—the current discussion is trying to actually do the work of figuring out what highly emotionally charged prototypes are in play and whether they’re relevant.
Something which gave me more sympathy for you guys: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—a very funny memoir by a British man with oppositional disorder (or, you prefer, a wild talent for saying and doing the wrong thing) who gets a job at Vanity Fair, a high end fashion and gossip magazine. The book (get the paperback if you’re interested—it’s got an epilogue) includes his very convoluted courtship, and it does include ignoring some ‘go away’ messages in a very high stakes game. It would be interesting to see his wife’s version of the interactions which led up to their marriage.
[1] One of my female friends finds this formulation annoying because it leaves out the non-trivial number of sexually frustrated women. However, I’m talking about attention, as well as sex.
targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness
For the most part, I would say that this is true, and that targeting “want” is the general principle of PU. I do think it is a legitimate worry that some particular techniques might lead a small segment of the audience to go along with things they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about. That probably is not the intent of those techniques, and it’s an accidental result when the PUA misperceives the assertiveness or vulnerability of the person he is dealing with. In all forms of influence and sales, it’s just a difficult feat to maximize the ability of the other person to say “yes” at the same time as maximizing their ability to say “no.”
This is why I’m such a big of Juggler Method, which involves encouraging the other person to show commitment to the interaction and how it unfolds.
Ahh, I see and I share your loathing of that kind of niceness.
It took me a while to work out how you were relating this to pickup arts—because I associate the kind of behaviors that rely on exploiting weak boundaries (and in particular exploiting them) to get sex with manipulative ‘nice guys’ and not pickup artists. Pickup arts are more or less all targeted at the ‘want’ side of things and not about exploiting niceness. Not out of any ideological purity but simply because they are targeted at gendter typical women with high self esteem who, approximately by how those terms are defined in the culture, are emphatically not nice when it comes to sex. Manipulative ‘nice guys’ on the other hand notorious for being masters at throwing around feelings of guilt and obligation.
That said, I can see how PUAs could be frustrating or even threatening to women who do not appreciate sexual persistence.
Bizarrely, my initial reaction to your post was to feel tired and angry—that’s why I took some time to chill. I think what was going on at my end might have been effort shock—it’s hard work to be clear and reasonable when I’m trying to explain something that has me frightened and angry to people who don’t seem to have any understanding of what I’m talking about, and kind of shocking that it took that much work to get to a moderate amount of understanding. You may be feeling the same way some of the time.
Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and I’m wondering how you distinguish between women who have weak boundaries and those who don’t.
And also whether you guys have anything about noticing if a woman is trying to signal that she’s attracted to you. I’m not saying it’s the most common thing, but I’ve heard enough from both men and women about that sort of signal failing that I don’t think it’s totally rare.
More generally, it bothers that you make claims that PUA is a net gain for women when there hasn’t been (and probably can’t be) a way to really check on the total effect.
The funny thing is that it’s been quite a while since I figured out that women typically get much more sexual attention than they want [1], and men typically get much less, and that this leads to drastic difficulties in mutual comprehension. That was the abstraction—the current discussion is trying to actually do the work of figuring out what highly emotionally charged prototypes are in play and whether they’re relevant.
Something which gave me more sympathy for you guys: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People—a very funny memoir by a British man with oppositional disorder (or, you prefer, a wild talent for saying and doing the wrong thing) who gets a job at Vanity Fair, a high end fashion and gossip magazine. The book (get the paperback if you’re interested—it’s got an epilogue) includes his very convoluted courtship, and it does include ignoring some ‘go away’ messages in a very high stakes game. It would be interesting to see his wife’s version of the interactions which led up to their marriage.
[1] One of my female friends finds this formulation annoying because it leaves out the non-trivial number of sexually frustrated women. However, I’m talking about attention, as well as sex.
For the most part, I would say that this is true, and that targeting “want” is the general principle of PU. I do think it is a legitimate worry that some particular techniques might lead a small segment of the audience to go along with things they aren’t particularly enthusiastic about. That probably is not the intent of those techniques, and it’s an accidental result when the PUA misperceives the assertiveness or vulnerability of the person he is dealing with. In all forms of influence and sales, it’s just a difficult feat to maximize the ability of the other person to say “yes” at the same time as maximizing their ability to say “no.”
This is why I’m such a big of Juggler Method, which involves encouraging the other person to show commitment to the interaction and how it unfolds.