Okay, this has me curious—is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.
And apparently a “Playette FAQ” as well. (It makes heavy use of PUA terminology like “one-itis” and “IOI”, though.)
I haven’t really read ASFin almost 20 years, so I didn’t know about the Playette stuff. Funny story, though: I can attest to the value of the “whiff” technique in the Playette FAQ, because my wife used it in our first email and phone conversations, back in 1992… and well, um, it worked out pretty well for both of us. ;-)
That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it’s unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I’ve often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you’re asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man’s part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google “dark triad”), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.
There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.
This is a general comment about the PUA material I’ve read.
It comes off as lonely. There’s no hint of enjoying someone’s company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer’s company if not manipulated into it.
Yes. Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of “nice guys” vs. “jackasses”.
What the PUA people call “day game” (approaching women in everyday life, instead of bars and clubs) can verge on the concept of enjoyable company, but from my limited reading on the subject they don’t seem to cover day game nearly as much. They say it’s more difficult than “night game”.
It’s a little like something in a famous essay by Eric Raymond on “good porn” vs. “bad porn”. (Just google on those phrases to find a copy—I don’t care to do that search from a machine at work.) Following a personally conducted scientific examination of porn pictures on the web, he concluded that men looking for porn are not looking for depictions of attractive young women posed as if about to have enjoyable sex with the viewer. The porn industry knows what sells, and pictures of that sort, that Raymond called “good porn”, formed only a small minority. They are looking for what he classified as “bad porn”: pictures of an absolutely joyless activity, all hard faces, cold stares, and fetishistic trappings.
ETA: Eric Raymond’s essay is on his own blog here, and he’s updated some of the links that were broken when I first read it, so you can see some of his experimental samples.
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it’s taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
an you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
You’re sympathizing with the men, which is natural—without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them—if that’s too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don’t think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don’t take into account that they’re observing men’s in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they’d perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that’s just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they’re caught off guard rambling, or when they’re writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women—many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.
From the PUAs I’ve known, they are unlikely to be wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are more likely to be sheep in wolves’ clothing. There are a few guys who are badly adjusted and have weird antisocial ideas in the local PUA group, and other guys make fun of them behind their backs.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you’ll see on even the worst PUA forums.
Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I’ve never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women—not all women, of course, and I won’t speculate on the percentage, but it’s certainly non-negligible. Note that I don’t mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.
In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it.
I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that ‘hooked’ me, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.
People often meet a person they like but can’t commit to romantically because of small ‘defects’ in the person’s behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I’d be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I’m in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).
So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.
You’re response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
The Rules is probably the best known example. I haven’t read it and don’t know whether there is any validity to the claims. I suspect there’s some truth in there but that it is not terribly rigorous or accurate.
I haven’t read this book either, but a significant piece of evidence against it is that one of the authors divorced her husband only a few years after it was published. Otherwise, I’ve seen it get mixed to negative comments on game websites, the principal complaint being that a man who lets himself be played by those rules may easily ipso facto signal low status to the point where he’ll destroy her respect for (and thus attraction to) him. Some of the tactics allegedly advocated by the book indeed sound that way, but I won’t pass any definite judgments since I haven’t read it.
What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
Certainly such products exist (e.g. catchhimandkeephim.com, husbandscantresist.com) but I’m not familiar with any free online resources comparable to the vast assortment available for men. Catchhimandkeephim.com has some articles, but skimming through I found it difficult to judge how useful a woman would find this advice, as it sounded all very obvious and straightforward to me… but then, I’m a man, and the articles are about how men react and think. It’s possible that the information would be a revelation for someone who wasn’t a man. ;-)
There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven’t read any, so I can’t recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I’ve seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.
Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women’s relationship strategies and techniques I’ve ever read on game-related sites, I’ve never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.
Yes, it’s harder to do experiments on parts of the interaction that occur later down the line. I think that’s a lot of the reason that PUAs talk so much more about pickup than relationships (though PUA forums typically have active relationships boards): the conversion funnel of approaches to dating to relationships gets narrower and narrower. PUAs spend most of their time stuck at particular interaction points prior to relationships, such as getting numbers and women not calling them back, going on dates with women and not being able to kiss them, or only successfully attracting women who don’t quite meet their relationship criteria. I’ve noticed that once PUAs get all that stuff handled, they start talking about relationships more than the mechanics of pickup, and actually get really picky.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
As for the Dark Triad, I don’t know what’s going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.
Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers—they’re imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.
Also, I hope it’s less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I’m not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.
It’s clear that how reliable people’s survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I’ve never seen a substantial discussion of how the “this is good for me, that is bad for me” sense works.
You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.
Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I’d rather not just drop concrete names and places I’ve found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.
It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance
This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)
Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn’t apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.
In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.
Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
I have often been bitterly amused at how the “Yes, but...” speeches on the misogyny often perpetrated by Western socially/sexually deprived men, on the one hand, and the crime often perpetrated by lower-class Afro-Americans, on the other hand, often end up disquietingly similar.
And with good reason; in both cases, we have angry, alienated young men who are least able to cope with the systemic oppression of their social group, least willing to play by the rules that treat them unfairly, spiral into hatred and evil, bringing even more scorn upon their group and the peaceful advocates in it, and inadverently creating good conditions for the “natural-born” antisocial/immoral assholes who wear their colors.
“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
-Martin Luther King
Sadly, for now the MRAs/gender egalitarians seem to be doing far worse than even American blacks—see the bitter split with feminism, and the inability of similarly-minded feminists and MRAs to leave behind the sectarianism. (This collective blog that HughRistik writes for is the kind of collaboration that I’d like to see way more of on the gender front.)
I think you have had your opinion coloured by encountering people in the anger phase of the denial, anger, acceptance progression of changing beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it’s true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here’s the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it’s on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias): http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it’s also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy’s blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he’s not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
Agreed. I also noticed that there was basically nothing about the wife’s individual personality. She could have been anybody, as long as she was gameable.
And the couple of tidbits that don’t sound dreadful and nasty to me, do sound like they are okay by accident—the theory sounds like bullshit, it’s just a stopped clock right twice a day. Example:
Panicking when one’s faithfulness is questioned is bad, but not because it’s “beta” and signifies fear of the wife or something—but because if the question causes panic, that might be because there’s cheating going on and he fears being caught. The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations. Presenting concrete evidence (unless asked for it!) might or might not hurt, but it probably won’t help, especially if you can come up with it too quickly—readily thought-of evidence could be planted, or might signify that you’ve already considered what to say if asked because there’s some reason to expect her to ask you wanted to be prepared for.
The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations.
The problem with this approach is that factual statements can be argued with, putting you back into the same place as before—i.e., having an argument where you’re being accused of something. The “agree and amplify” approach has the tactical advantage that it leaves the other person with no place to escalate to, and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.
(Note: I’m not commenting here on the (un)desirability of having an adversarial relationship like that to begin with, just pointing to a tactical advantage of the proposed “agree and amplify” over a flat assertion or denial. Another advantage, btw, is that it can actually make the accuser paradoxically feel listened to/accepted/validated in a way that disagreement does not. My wife has actually successfully used this tactic on me when I’ve been annoyed at some minor thing—the old, “yes, I did do that, and I did it just to annoy you” routine. ;-) )
I was generalizing. The examples of “before” conversations make it sound like he thinks he’s being accused of some sort of infidelity (however minor) and that he’s scared of being so accused.
As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He’s attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.
I think you’re making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I’d say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn’t mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I’ve seen. (I don’t think it’s for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)
In particular, I’m struck by the quality of many commenters I’ve seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it’s actually not surprising when you consider that it’s an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.
All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.
Okay, this has me curious—is there actually a subset of pickup that is designed to tell me what to do, instead of telling people what to do to me? That would be news to me.
What, you mean girl game? Yeah, sure. It’s just not as big as guy game. ASF has a board for girls only.
*pokes around*
Meh. This reminds me of advice columns, only with worse punctuation.
And apparently a “Playette FAQ” as well. (It makes heavy use of PUA terminology like “one-itis” and “IOI”, though.)
I haven’t really read ASFin almost 20 years, so I didn’t know about the Playette stuff. Funny story, though: I can attest to the value of the “whiff” technique in the Playette FAQ, because my wife used it in our first email and phone conversations, back in 1992… and well, um, it worked out pretty well for both of us. ;-)
That depends on what exactly your goal is. Typical men can boost their sexual attractiveness to women by changing their behavior far more than vice versa, so it’s unsurprising that there is a much greater body of expertise aimed at men in this regard. Also, getting sex is pretty much trivial for women and requires no particular skill. However, commitment and long-term relationship strategies are important and nontrivial for women too, and on better game-oriented blogs, I’ve often seen good discussions about the mistakes women make in this regard. Trouble is, realistic treatments of this issue tend to bring up even more ugly truths and end up sounding even less PC than the ordinary PUA stuff.
Can you give a couple examples?
Alicorn:
Like in everything else, humans make bad decisions due to biases in matters of mating and pairing too. However, these particular biases are male- and female-specific, and pointing out the latter is easily perceived by women as an affront to their sex, which makes realistic discussion very hard.
But since you’re asking, here are some instances of such biases. None of them are universal, but each is held strongly by non-negligible numbers of women and leads them to decisions they later regret. One example is when women overestimate the attractiveness of men they can realistically hope to attract for serious permanent commitment, given the higher attractiveness of men they can attract for temporary relationships and short-term flings without any real commitment on the man’s part. Another is when women underestimate the speed with which their looks and reproductive abilities deteriorate with age. Yet another is the refusal to acknowledge that women can be greatly attracted to some very nasty personality types of men, not despite them but because of them (google “dark triad”), which leads some women to entering disastrous relationships with such men. Then there are also many wrong beliefs about what personality characteristics of women are truly attractive and pleasant to men and apt to attract their loyalty and commitment in the long run.
There are other examples too, many of which would probably sound more controversial. Even these I listed can provoke much worse reactions when put in less abstract and detached terms, which is typically necessary when forming concrete advice.
You’re bi, right? You could probably make use of much of the advice for straight men if you wanted.
I find it nasty to read. It’s not intended for me, even if I’d be interested in some of the people it’s about interacting with.
This is a general comment about the PUA material I’ve read.
It comes off as lonely. There’s no hint of enjoying someone’s company, or hope that a someone could enjoy the writer’s company if not manipulated into it.
Yes. Sometimes I get a sense of simmering resentment underneath it all, especially on the subject of “nice guys” vs. “jackasses”.
What the PUA people call “day game” (approaching women in everyday life, instead of bars and clubs) can verge on the concept of enjoyable company, but from my limited reading on the subject they don’t seem to cover day game nearly as much. They say it’s more difficult than “night game”.
It’s a little like something in a famous essay by Eric Raymond on “good porn” vs. “bad porn”. (Just google on those phrases to find a copy—I don’t care to do that search from a machine at work.) Following a personally conducted scientific examination of porn pictures on the web, he concluded that men looking for porn are not looking for depictions of attractive young women posed as if about to have enjoyable sex with the viewer. The porn industry knows what sells, and pictures of that sort, that Raymond called “good porn”, formed only a small minority. They are looking for what he classified as “bad porn”: pictures of an absolutely joyless activity, all hard faces, cold stares, and fetishistic trappings.
ETA: Eric Raymond’s essay is on his own blog here, and he’s updated some of the links that were broken when I first read it, so you can see some of his experimental samples.
Yes: It’s so bitter and so full of blame for the vast sea of women who didn’t respond as desired to “niceness”.
I find the resentment off-putting too, and as in any other area of human concern, there is indeed a lot of unjustified feeling of entitlement. However, it should be noted that the main reason for the resentment is the rules-hypocrisy. Many men are indeed too clueless to figure out the disconnect between the official attitudes and values that are professed piously in our culture and the actual rules of the status game that it’s taboo to discuss openly (so that such discussions are corralled off to disreputable venues like the PUA culture). Can you really blame them for being frustrated when they naively play by the official rules and end up scorned as low-status losers, or for acting out a bit when they finally realize what’s been going on?
This isn’t about blame, it’s about revulsion, and possibly about anger and fear.
You’re sympathizing with the men, which is natural—without speculating about details, your experience is more like theirs. Try imagining dating one of them, or being in a relationship with them—if that’s too much of a strain, try imagining reading a forum of women who are that hurt and angry about men.
Fair enough. However, I would say that women tend to display at least two major biases when they encounter this sort of stuff. (I don’t think these biases completely account for the fear and revulsion you mention, but they do mean that it often goes too far.)
First, women often don’t take into account that they’re observing men’s in-clique behavior, which they rarely, if ever, see in real life. Many young men whom they’d perceive as decent, polite, overall good guys (and who indeed are that by any reasonable standards) sometimes spew out stuff that’s just as extreme when they loosen up over beers among their male buddies, complete with foul language, frustrated trashing of women who have hurt them, etc. It’s just that polite men instinctively watch their mouths when women or authority figures are within hearing distance, so when they’re caught off guard rambling, or when they’re writing anonymously on the internet, they tend to come off much worse than they really are.
Second, I understand that women might fear getting involved with a man whose attractive surface hides an angry, frustrated, manipulative PUA underneath, whose nasty nature will only later come to prominence. However, this fear is entirely out of proportion when you consider a similar, but much more prevalent and dangerous natural phenomenon. Namely, there are significant numbers of men around whose personalities are naturally fundamentally nasty but nevertheless wildly attractive to women—many of whom ruin their lives big time by pursuing relationships with such men. See, for example, the Dark Triad paper by Jonason et al. for a discussion along these lines, which is nowhere near a complete account of this entire phenomenon. This is realistically a far greater danger than encountering a PUA, who is anyway more likely to be just a regular guy who undertook some self-improvement than a monster lurking below a smooth surface.
From the PUAs I’ve known, they are unlikely to be wolves in sheep’s clothing… they are more likely to be sheep in wolves’ clothing. There are a few guys who are badly adjusted and have weird antisocial ideas in the local PUA group, and other guys make fun of them behind their backs.
Do you have that sort of distance when women vent about men?
As for the Dark Triad guys, I agree that they should be a matter of more concern—the only specific advice I’ve seen about avoiding them is to not get involved with a man who’s rude to waitresses.
NancyLebovitz:
I would say yes. I have a hobby of sorts that consists of exploring obscure corners of the web where various sorts of fringe people with unconventional (and often disreputable) ideas gather, and attempting to understand their perspectives in a detached manner, as free of bias as possible. As an example relevant for your question, I have read radical feminist websites where the level of anger against men far surpasses any venting against women you’ll see on even the worst PUA forums.
Now, my conclusion is that out of all these fringe groups, most of them just form their own echo chambers where they vent and reinforce their peculiar biases, but a small minority actually manage to come up with non-trivial accurate insight that is nowhere to be found in more reputable and mainstream sources. The PUA community just happens to be one such example. In contrast, I have never come across any analogous women’s community, where lots of valid and interesting insight would be offered alongside anti-male anger and venting, but if I hypothetically did, I have no doubt I would enjoy reading it. (There are also communities full of angry venting men where, in contrast to PUAs, I’ve never seen any particularly interesting ideas.)
Trouble is, some very strong biases are present here, because the ugly and hard to admit truth is that some personalty types of this sort are attractive as such to many women—not all women, of course, and I won’t speculate on the percentage, but it’s certainly non-negligible. Note that I don’t mean the situations where such dark characteristics are hidden under a nice surface only to emerge later, but when they are truly attractive by themselves, causing irresistible urges in women to engage in dangerous, self-immolating adventures with such men. You can view it as a specifically female form of extreme akrasia, I guess. The prevailing bias, however, is to interpret all such situations as women having been manipulated by a wolf in sheep’s clothing, even when the wolf was howling and brandishing his fangs from day one, only to get an enthusiastic response.
I would love to read material from a female analogue to PUA. Looking back on past relationships I can see some patterns for behavior that ‘hooked’ me, but I’m sure I’m missing a lot of potentially valuable insights.
People often meet a person they like but can’t commit to romantically because of small ‘defects’ in the person’s behavior as it relates to the relationship. Personally, I’d be all in favor of my significant other using PUA equivalent methods on me, provided I was aware it and had studied the material myself (in the same way that I’m in favor of my significant other wearing certain clothing, etc).
So, two main upshots of wide dissemination of PUA style material: better understanding of myself, and heightened attraction to my partner.
I replied to a similar question in this subthread.
You’re response in the subthread was more a list of biases exhibited by females (an interesting list though). What I’m looking for is a set of actionable techniques a woman can use in the context of a relationship to keep a man more interested.
The Rules is probably the best known example. I haven’t read it and don’t know whether there is any validity to the claims. I suspect there’s some truth in there but that it is not terribly rigorous or accurate.
I haven’t read this book either, but a significant piece of evidence against it is that one of the authors divorced her husband only a few years after it was published. Otherwise, I’ve seen it get mixed to negative comments on game websites, the principal complaint being that a man who lets himself be played by those rules may easily ipso facto signal low status to the point where he’ll destroy her respect for (and thus attraction to) him. Some of the tactics allegedly advocated by the book indeed sound that way, but I won’t pass any definite judgments since I haven’t read it.
Manslations is pretty good.
Certainly such products exist (e.g. catchhimandkeephim.com, husbandscantresist.com) but I’m not familiar with any free online resources comparable to the vast assortment available for men. Catchhimandkeephim.com has some articles, but skimming through I found it difficult to judge how useful a woman would find this advice, as it sounded all very obvious and straightforward to me… but then, I’m a man, and the articles are about how men react and think. It’s possible that the information would be a revelation for someone who wasn’t a man. ;-)
There are many books giving that sort of advice, but I haven’t read any, so I can’t recommend them. Just from the titles and blurbs I’ve seen, it can be reliably concluded that many are very bad.
Anecdotally, I can say that in the best discussions of women’s relationship strategies and techniques I’ve ever read on game-related sites, I’ve never seen anyone point out a book or any other source of systematic advice whose message closely matches the best evidence-supported conclusions of these discussions. I see this as a strong piece of evidence against the whole existing literature. This is not that surprising considering that the best evidence-supported conclusions sound, to a large degree, highly un-PC and shattering lots of pleasant-sounding illusions.
Another piece is that, to the extent that the challenge for women is getting commitment, it’s simply harder to do experiments.
Yes, it’s harder to do experiments on parts of the interaction that occur later down the line. I think that’s a lot of the reason that PUAs talk so much more about pickup than relationships (though PUA forums typically have active relationships boards): the conversion funnel of approaches to dating to relationships gets narrower and narrower. PUAs spend most of their time stuck at particular interaction points prior to relationships, such as getting numbers and women not calling them back, going on dates with women and not being able to kiss them, or only successfully attracting women who don’t quite meet their relationship criteria. I’ve noticed that once PUAs get all that stuff handled, they start talking about relationships more than the mechanics of pickup, and actually get really picky.
You might find The Fantasy of Being Thin interesting.
What insights have you found in odd corners of the web?
As for the Dark Triad, I don’t know what’s going on there. I tentatively assume that some people like danger, and what attracts some to motorcycles and mountain-climbing can also attract people to mates who have TROUBLE written all over them.
Alternatively, some women choose men like their fathers—they’re imprinted on a bad idea of what a man is.
Also, I hope it’s less common in the culture, but some women believe that they can turn a bad guy into a good one by being a sufficiently good wife. I’m not going to say it never happens, but making the attempt can be a powerful emotional hook.
It’s clear that how reliable people’s survival instincts are (and about what parts of their lives) vary tremendously, and I’ve never seen a substantial discussion of how the “this is good for me, that is bad for me” sense works.
Yes, I am familiar with this particular community. They do discuss some common biases in an interesting way, but ultimately, my conclusion is that they generate their own more severe ones, without adding much clarity to anything overall.
Well, that could be a topic for a whole book, not a mere blog comment. I’d rather not just drop concrete names and places I’ve found interesting, since without lots of painstaking explanations and disclaimers, it would send off a thunderous signal of affiliation with all kinds of disreputable people.
This would be extremely surprising to me if true. This sounds like something that was true in the 1950s, but does this really match your experience today? In my experience, at least among people under 30 or so, there is no difference between how guys and girls act in social situations when there are, or are not, members of the opposite sex around. (Business or formal situations are different.)
Well, I have no evidence except anecdotal to present, but yes, this does match my experience. It surely doesn’t apply to all individuals, social groups, and occasions, but I observe it regularly, and I have to personally plead guilty to a certain degree of such inconsistency. Especially when, for example, a guy gets dumped or rejected and wants to vent a bit by rambling about the evilness of the girl in question, or women in general, it definitely seems likely to me that much cruder rants can be produced in an exclusive company of close, trusted male friends than otherwise.
In any case, even if this is true only for a minority of men, my main point still holds, i.e. there are non-negligible numbers of men around who, despite being perfectly respectable by all other criteria, engage in crude language about women and male-female relations on some occasions when no women are around to hear it. For this reason, women are often biased in that they tend to interpret such language, when observed, as unrealistically strong evidence of serious character flaws in the man in question.
I have often been bitterly amused at how the “Yes, but...” speeches on the misogyny often perpetrated by Western socially/sexually deprived men, on the one hand, and the crime often perpetrated by lower-class Afro-Americans, on the other hand, often end up disquietingly similar.
And with good reason; in both cases, we have angry, alienated young men who are least able to cope with the systemic oppression of their social group, least willing to play by the rules that treat them unfairly, spiral into hatred and evil, bringing even more scorn upon their group and the peaceful advocates in it, and inadverently creating good conditions for the “natural-born” antisocial/immoral assholes who wear their colors.
-Martin Luther King
Sadly, for now the MRAs/gender egalitarians seem to be doing far worse than even American blacks—see the bitter split with feminism, and the inability of similarly-minded feminists and MRAs to leave behind the sectarianism. (This collective blog that HughRistik writes for is the kind of collaboration that I’d like to see way more of on the gender front.)
I think you have had your opinion coloured by encountering people in the anger phase of the denial, anger, acceptance progression of changing beliefs in the light of new evidence.
Depends where you look. Some of that stuff is indeed written in such tone, and it’s true that some of it advises sly and dishonest tactics. On the other hand, here’s the story of a man who saved his marriage by applying insights he gained on game websites (the blog might be NSFW for foul language, though it’s on the blogroll of Overcoming Bias):
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/relationship-game-week-a-readers-journey/
For me, that story seems awfully depressing. Nothing in the story suggested to me that the man loved his wife or that his wife loved him. Game may have permitted them to have a more harmonious marriage, and evidently better sex, but not a relationship that seemed based on mutual love and respect.
It may be that the marriage was just too flawed to begin with; it’s also possible, given that the writer was writing for Roissy’s blog, that he consciously left details and color about love out of his narrative. But from what he has actually written, he’s not describing the sort of marriage that I would want to be a part of.
Agreed. I also noticed that there was basically nothing about the wife’s individual personality. She could have been anybody, as long as she was gameable.
And the couple of tidbits that don’t sound dreadful and nasty to me, do sound like they are okay by accident—the theory sounds like bullshit, it’s just a stopped clock right twice a day. Example:
Panicking when one’s faithfulness is questioned is bad, but not because it’s “beta” and signifies fear of the wife or something—but because if the question causes panic, that might be because there’s cheating going on and he fears being caught. The post recommends teasing. That is better than panic (ymmv), but my guess would be that even better would be a perfectly calm and deadpanned: “No.” Or a longer sentence, but just as declarative: “I am not cheating on you.” No details or explanations or protestations. Presenting concrete evidence (unless asked for it!) might or might not hurt, but it probably won’t help, especially if you can come up with it too quickly—readily thought-of evidence could be planted, or might signify that you’ve already considered what to say if asked because there’s some reason to expect her to ask you wanted to be prepared for.
The problem with this approach is that factual statements can be argued with, putting you back into the same place as before—i.e., having an argument where you’re being accused of something. The “agree and amplify” approach has the tactical advantage that it leaves the other person with no place to escalate to, and can be repeated more or less indefinitely.
(Note: I’m not commenting here on the (un)desirability of having an adversarial relationship like that to begin with, just pointing to a tactical advantage of the proposed “agree and amplify” over a flat assertion or denial. Another advantage, btw, is that it can actually make the accuser paradoxically feel listened to/accepted/validated in a way that disagreement does not. My wife has actually successfully used this tactic on me when I’ve been annoyed at some minor thing—the old, “yes, I did do that, and I did it just to annoy you” routine. ;-) )
The incident described in the piece doesn’t involve the possibility of cheating at all.
I was generalizing. The examples of “before” conversations make it sound like he thinks he’s being accused of some sort of infidelity (however minor) and that he’s scared of being so accused.
As I mentioned once before but should mention again since you linked to his blog, Roissy is not representative of PUAs. He is like most of the worst things about PUAs, plus some other flaws of his own, all packed together. He’s attracted a lot of attention outside the seduction community, but virtually nobody inside it knows who he is or cares about him.
I think you’re making the mistake of judging him for his theatrics and shock-value approach. Once you get past the swaggering style, tune in to his sense of humor, and figure out which commenters are worth reading, I’d say his blog is by far the best place for all but the most technical discussions of all aspects of male-female interactions. This doesn’t mean I endorse all he has to say, of course, but the level of insight far surpasses the other game/PUA sites I’ve seen. (I don’t think it’s for nothing that Robin Hanson links to him.)
In particular, I’m struck by the quality of many commenters I’ve seen there through the years, though in this regard, the blog is past its prime (and even back in the past, you had to sift through the detritus of unmoderated comments to find the gems). What many people might find strange is that lots of the regulars there are women, some of them extremely smart and cultured, though it’s actually not surprising when you consider that it’s an environment where the usual rules-hypocrisy is thrown out the window.
All in all, there is certainly much there to be offended by, and in fact, for lots of that stuff, one is required to be offended by it according to the official respectable standards of our culture. Yet anyone striving to eliminate biases about these topics should find much of the insight offered there worthwhile.