So the only rational solution is to guess, unless you are comfortable screening out women who can’t have explicit discussions of their preferences early in the interaction. (Though you can help your guessing by starting oblique discussions of preferences, such as talking about relationship history and listening carefully.)
….
It also leads to some interesting practical consequences, where sometimes it’s better to increase the variance in your attractiveness even at the cost of your average attractiveness to the female population.
I think you’ve highlighted an important difference between the inside view and outside view of PUA.
Outsiders think that for PUA to be valid, it has to have techniques that work on “most women”. However, for insiders, it simply has to have a set of techniques that work on women they are personally interested in.
Outsiders, though, tend to think that the set of “women PUAs are personally interested in” is much more homogeneous than it really is. The women that say, Decker of AMP goes for, are orders of magnitude more introspective than those that say, Mystery goes for. David D seems to like ambitious professional women. Johnny Soporno seems to dig women with depth of emotion who’ll all be a big happy family in his harem. Some gurus seem to like women they can boss around. Juggler seems to value good conversation. (And notice that none of these preferences are, “who I can get to sleep with me tonight”. Even Mystery’s preference for models and strippers is much more about status than it is about sex.)
Granted—these are all superficial personal impressions of mine, based on random bits of information, but it’s helpful to point out that men’s preferences vary just as much as women’s do. PUA is not a single unified field aimed at claiming a uniform set of women for a uniform set of men. It is a set of interlinked and related fields of what works for specific groups of women in specific situations…
Conditioned on the preferences of the men who are interested in them.
That is, successful PUAs intentionally choose (or invent) behaviors and sets of techniques that will screen out women that they are not interested in. And they don’t engage in a search for what technique will work on the woman they’re with—they do what the kind of woman they want would like.
Now, there are certainly schools of thought who think the goal is to figure out whatever woman is in front of them, but my observation of what the people in PUA who seem happy with their life and work say, is that they always effectively talk about being fully themselves, and how this automatically causes one group to gravitate towards them, and the rest to gravitate away.
This has also been my personal experience when I was single and doing “social game” (which as I said, I didn’t know was a thing until much later).
What I’ve also noticed is that many gurus who used to teach mechanical, manipulative game methods have later slid over to this line of thought—specifically, many have said that thinking in terms of “what do I need to do to get this woman to like me” is actually hurting your inner game, because it sets the frame that you are the pursuer and she is the selector, and that this is going to cause her to test you more than if you just were totally open about who you are and what you want in the first place, so there’s no neediness or apprehension for her to probe.
Some people talk about feigning disinterest, but I think that what really works (from my limited experience) is genuine disinterest in people who aren’t what you’re looking for. In some schools, this is talked about as a tactic (i.e. “qualifying” and “disqualifying”), but I think the more mature schools and gurus speak about it as a way of thinking, or a lifestyle.
Anyway, tl;dr version: the success of PUA as a field isn’t predicated on one set of techniques “working” on all taxa of women, it’s predicated on individual PUAs being able to select behaviors that work well with the taxa he wants them to “work” on… and the taxa for which techniques exist is considerably wider than field-outsiders are aware of… leading to difficult communication with insiders, who implicitly understand this variability and don’t get why the outsiders are being so narrowminded.
I think you’ve highlighted an important difference between the inside view and outside view of PUA.
Outsiders think that for PUA to be valid, it has to have techniques that work on “most women”. However, for insiders, it simply has to have a set of techniques that work on women they are personally interested in.
Outsiders, though, tend to think that the set of “women PUAs are personally interested in” is much more homogeneous than it really is. The women that say, Decker of AMP goes for, are orders of magnitude more introspective than those that say, Mystery goes for. David D seems to like ambitious professional women. Johnny Soporno seems to dig women with depth of emotion who’ll all be a big happy family in his harem. Some gurus seem to like women they can boss around. Juggler seems to value good conversation. (And notice that none of these preferences are, “who I can get to sleep with me tonight”. Even Mystery’s preference for models and strippers is much more about status than it is about sex.)
Granted—these are all superficial personal impressions of mine, based on random bits of information, but it’s helpful to point out that men’s preferences vary just as much as women’s do. PUA is not a single unified field aimed at claiming a uniform set of women for a uniform set of men. It is a set of interlinked and related fields of what works for specific groups of women in specific situations…
Conditioned on the preferences of the men who are interested in them.
That is, successful PUAs intentionally choose (or invent) behaviors and sets of techniques that will screen out women that they are not interested in. And they don’t engage in a search for what technique will work on the woman they’re with—they do what the kind of woman they want would like.
Now, there are certainly schools of thought who think the goal is to figure out whatever woman is in front of them, but my observation of what the people in PUA who seem happy with their life and work say, is that they always effectively talk about being fully themselves, and how this automatically causes one group to gravitate towards them, and the rest to gravitate away.
This has also been my personal experience when I was single and doing “social game” (which as I said, I didn’t know was a thing until much later).
What I’ve also noticed is that many gurus who used to teach mechanical, manipulative game methods have later slid over to this line of thought—specifically, many have said that thinking in terms of “what do I need to do to get this woman to like me” is actually hurting your inner game, because it sets the frame that you are the pursuer and she is the selector, and that this is going to cause her to test you more than if you just were totally open about who you are and what you want in the first place, so there’s no neediness or apprehension for her to probe.
Some people talk about feigning disinterest, but I think that what really works (from my limited experience) is genuine disinterest in people who aren’t what you’re looking for. In some schools, this is talked about as a tactic (i.e. “qualifying” and “disqualifying”), but I think the more mature schools and gurus speak about it as a way of thinking, or a lifestyle.
Anyway, tl;dr version: the success of PUA as a field isn’t predicated on one set of techniques “working” on all taxa of women, it’s predicated on individual PUAs being able to select behaviors that work well with the taxa he wants them to “work” on… and the taxa for which techniques exist is considerably wider than field-outsiders are aware of… leading to difficult communication with insiders, who implicitly understand this variability and don’t get why the outsiders are being so narrowminded.