Practice Practice Practice Practice Practice. You have to go out of your way to hang out with people to get any good at being fun to hang out with. WARNING: This does not mean you have to spend time at loud parties or bars or clubs. While they pretend to be areas for socializing, they’re not really. It’s one thing if you enjoy dancing or drinking, but places that are less loud and crowded are a lot better for conversation.
Practice Practice Practice Practice Practice. You have to go out of your way to hang out with people to get any good at being fun to hang out with.
I’ve done this and it didn’t really work. Maybe it worked a little, but not at a very fast rate. To be honest, I think reading a small amount of social skills stuff and thinking about how to solve the problem a little helped much more than all the “practice” I’ve done in the last year or so.
Obviously you can’t take this to the extreme and expect that you can instantly go from Michael Cera to Casanova just by sitting alone reading stuff and watching videos in your room, but I don’t think the statement “If you spend enough time in social interactions, you will inevitably develop good social skills” is at all true either.
It’s one thing if you enjoy dancing or drinking
I kind of despise the former and love the latter. :\
I hated dancing before I learned it, but I love it now. I am very bad at “learning by copying others”, but with good explicit education I became a decent dancer.
(Note: Almost everyone adviced me against explicit learning, because they said it wouldn’t be “natural” or “romantic”. I ignored all this advice, and now no one complains about the result. Contrary to predictions, learning the steps explicitly helped me to improvise later. Seems like people just have a strong taboo about applying reductionism to romantic activities like dancing.)
Interesting; no one has ever told me that dancing lessons are a bad idea. I think we live in very different cultures. (Other things you have said in the past have also given me his impression.)
No, no, no, this was a bad explanation on my part. No one told me that dancing lessons are bad idea per se… only that my specific learning style is.
This is what works best for me: Show me the moves. Now show me those moves again very slowly, beat by beat. Show me separately what feet do; then what hands and head do. Tell me at which moment which leg supports the weight (I don’t see it, and it is important). When and how exactly do I signal to my girl what is expected from her. (In some rare situations, to get it, I need to try her movements, too.) I still don’t get it, but be patient with me. Let me repeat the first beat, and tell me what was wrong. Again, until it is right. Then the second beat. Etc. Then the whole thing together. Now let’s do the same thing again, and again, and again, exactly the same way. Then something “clicks” in my head, and I get the move… and since that moment I can lead, improvise, talk during dance, whatever. -- As a beginner I was blessed with a partner who didn’t run away screaming somewhere in the middle of this. Later my learning became faster, partially because I learned to ask the proper questions. And I had a good luck to dancing teacher who was a former engineer, so he was able to comply with my strange demands.
In contrast, this is what seems to me a typical learning process, at the dancing lessons: Teacher shows the steps quickly. Then shows the steps quickly again. And again. At this moment people in the room start getting it, and they do it halfway correctly. And the more they do it, the better they get.
This absolutely does not work for me. I can learn to do things slowly; but I can’t learn then quickly, not even approximately. I can progress from “slowly but correctly” to “quickly but correctly”, but I can’t progress from “incorrectly” to “correctly” at any speed by mere repetition and observation. Most people seem to have this ability to copy each other. I don’t. I need to be explained the mechanism, step by step. (And this is not just in dancing. Sorry for touching an irrelevant taboo topic, but the PUA literature did exactly the same thing for me about human relations. Despite all the biases et cetera, that was the only source that told me explicitly what most humans learn by copying and probably never bother to explain in a way comprehensive to me.)
Now, after seeing my learning style, the typical reaction was that I should stop doing that, because my dancing style will be ugly and “robotic”, and my partners will feel uncomfotable. Instead I should just do what other people are doing, for a very long time. Wrong in both aspects. First, doing what other people do, just for a longer time, sometimes does not work for me. My head just works differently, or something. Second, after the moment the moves “click” in my head, my dancing becomes okay. If you didn’t see me at the beginning, you would not expect I had so much trouble learning that. Actually, I got feedback from new partners that I dance better than average, and that I am very good at leading. I can teach a girl a new dance in 5 minutes and then lead her so that no one expects she is doing this for the first time. -- This is the other side of how my head works: It takes me a lot of time to understand something, but then I can explain it extremely quickly. (Again, this is not just in dancing. I used to teach maths privately, and the results were good. Many people can do math, but can’t teach it. Although I didn’t have the same kind of problem learning maths, probably because it already is pretty explicit.)
Now, after seeing my learning style, the typical reaction was that I should stop doing that, because my dancing style will be ugly and “robotic”, and my partners will feel uncomfotable.
Now, that’s about the only possible way to learn to play anything non-trivial on instruments such as the guitar; therefore, these people
believe that all guitar music is ugly and robotic, or
have no idea of how people learn to play, or
are confused and/or talking through their asses (e.g. some part of them deep down is saying ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’)
(not necessarily with probabilities within an order of magnitude of each other).
I completely agree with you (which is why I persisted in my learning style). From my experience it seems to me many people are confused like this.
Possible explanation: We learn some things by copying or early in childhood, and we learn some other things explicitly. I guess this makes many people think that skills are divided to “explicitly teachable” and “explicitly unteachable”, using some heuristics, such as: “if it is usually learned at school, it is teachable”, “if I tried to learn it and failed, it is unteachable”, “it is teachable only if I perfectly understand how it works”, etc.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills. Similarly to attribution fallacy, if we see someone good at doing X, it is easier to assume that it is a part of their nature, not a learned skill. (And those people may support us in this opinion, for example because it discourages the competition.) Seems to me this is pretty frequent in art. Also, sometimes the idea of “unteachable skill” is a good excuse for not learning and doing something.
Even those people who learned e.g. playing guitar may not propagate the idea automatically to other aspects of their lives.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills.
Sometimes people don’t see how they themselves learned something. When you ask them, they confabulate empty phrases like “it’s a knack”, or “eventually you just get it”, or the like. They generally suck at explaining. So, ignore them and move on.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills.
I was assuming that those people had themselves learned to dance at some point, so unless it was a very long time ago and/or they suck at introspection they knew how they did it. If you were talking about people who didn’t themselves know how to dance, then replace ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’ with ‘I’m jealous those people can dance and I can’t, but I can’t be bothered to learn it myself, so in order to put them down I’ll tell them that their grapes are sour’.
Maybe there are two learning styles—copying and explicit—each of them having their set of advantages and disadvantages. (Perhaps an analogy to System 1 and System 2.)
Learning by copying is faster and it does not require cooperation from the person you copy. On the other hand, copying is imperfect, and you cannot copy what you don’t see. Learning explicitly is slower and requires a good explanation; which requires a good introspection from the person who explains.
So maybe this is an instance of “the last will be first”. -- People who are good at learning by copying, use learning by copying as their favorite learning style. People who are bad at learning by copying can compensate by focusing on explicit learning.
Under these assumptions, the “copying” people have a fast start, because many activities are simple and can be learned by copying. Then when it comes to more complex activities, they usually continue copying, get some mediocre results, and stop there. And even there, they probably get those mediocre results faster than an “explicit” person. -- They really believe that learning by copying is superior, because this is what worked for them. Learning explicitly is just a strange ritual done at school; and I suspect that even there they try to copy the teachers.
On the other hand, “explicit” people learn slowly and are completely dependent on good learning materials. Sometimes the good materials are available, and allow them to reach mastery in complex things. The whole school system is designed for this. Sometimes the materials are unavailable or misleading (e.g. because the topic is mindkilling), and they are lost. These are the “book smart” people. -- They believe in explicit learning, because this is what worked for them.
These are just extreme descriptions, I guess most people use learning by copying in some areas and explicit learning in other areas. They may have an explanation about which style is better in which situation. There are things that give advantage to one of those styles in a given area: how big inferential distances are there, how visible is the information, how good are available teaching materials. But better teaching materials can be made even in areas where learning by copying has the natural advantage. -- It’s just than in a given area, when most people are satisfied with what they learn by copying, developing techniques for explicit learning may seem unnecessary and “wrong”. This can be more complicated if saying that the copying does not work for you means advertising your low status, so the defense of explicit techniques itself becomes a low-status thing to do, and insisting that those techniques are completely unnecessary becomes a signal of good copying skills and high status.
Sorry for touching an irrelevant taboo topic, but the PUA literature did exactly the same thing for me about human relations. Despite all the biases et cetera, that was the only source that told me explicitly what most humans learn by copying and probably never bother to explain in a way comprehensive to me.
Sorry for only commenting on the irrelevant taboo topic you touched on, but this is interesting to me. I have been reading some PUA stuff lately and it seems to me that the whole point is that it is not describing something that ordinary humans learn naturally, but instead prescribing something extraordinary that you can do to set yourself apart from the crowd in order to attract the hottest girl in the club that every other guy in there is hitting on. And even then it only works via the law of averages, and requires one to override one’s natural intense aversion to rejection in order to pursue a more rational strategy adapted for a modern world in which you can talk to someone once and never see them again.
These days PUA refers to so many things that I need to be more specific. The sources that helped me were “The Mystery Method” by Mystery, “How To Become An Alpha Male” by Carlos Xuma, “Married Man Sex Life” by Athol Kay. I would also recommend “The Blueprint Decoded” by RSD.
Yes, there are many sources that only tell you “do this, do that, and if it does not work, just do it again”. I guess this is what most customers want: “Don’t bother me with explanations, just give me a quick fix!” This is how most people approach everything. Well, if there is a demand for something, the market will provide a product. And these days it is a huge business. Ten years ago, it was more like geeks experimenting and sharing their results and opinions… a bit similar to Quantified Self today, just less scientific, and sometimes more narrowly focused.
Overcoming aversion to rejection, doing many approaches to convert given rates of success into greater absolute numbers, doing something extraordinary to stand out of the crowd… those are the fixes. Applied incorrectly they could be even harmful. (Receiving a lot of rejection can make you more resistant, but can also break you. Standing out of the crowd is costly signalling, you need to pay the costs. Doing many approaches may cost you socially.) But there is a theory behind that, and maybe it is not clearly explained, maybe it is not emphasised enough, or maybe it is already obvious to many people, and only a relevation for the most clueless guys like me. (Actually, maybe the explanations are not in the books, but in the related blogs. I don’t remember the exact sources of information. I am only sure that “Married Man Sex Life” contains the theory explicitly.) And I guess for a LW reader familiar with status and reductionism, another part is already known.
Here are a few useful ideas; the essence I got from the books and blogs, but the result may be a compilation of various sources, with a bit of LW lingo --
Humans are biological creatures. Attraction is a causal mechanism, not an unexplainable mystery. That does not mean there are no individual preferences. But the shared preferences are also important, and hugely underestimated.
Sometimes the society gives you wrong explanations, for various reasons: People fail at introspection. People optimize their answers for status, not for truth. The inferential distances between socially savvy and socially clueless is too big, so even a honest and good advice gets misunderstood and misapplied. To some degree, sexual mate selection is a zero-sum game, so there is an incentive to spread bad advice. The social advice is optimized for the needs of society (e.g. preserving the social order), which may be misaligned with your needs (e.g. getting from the bottom of the pecking order to the top). -- Of course, if we go more meta, the PUAs also have incentive (status, money) to give you bad advice. Caveat emptor; just don’t make this a fully general counterargument.
Reproduction strategies of males and females are different. Some things are universally attractive (health, intelligence), but some things are sex-specific, or at least have different weight for each sex. (Yeah, the mandatory disclaimer: Not all people are heterosexual, even the heterosexual people are not all the same, etc. Just don’t miss the forest because some trees are outside of it.) The specifically male preferences are widely known (all those half-naked ladies on the covers of magazines didn’t get there by accident). The specifically female preferences are somewhat less known. Why? Consider the incentives: Women prefer to keep this mysterious, because mysterious means higher status. (This is why any attempt to explain the mystery feels like a status attack.) Men who understand them have no incentive to teach it to their competitors. And the men who want to learn, must first get a huge status hit by admitting that they need to learn. (Even worse, the status hit is guaranteed, but the good advice in return is not, and most likely one will not get good advice.) This changed with the internet subculture of low-status males, where admitting to strangers to be low-status does not cost one socially, and thus the usually taboo topics may be freely explored. (With the commercialization of PUA, the status games are back again.)
Specifically: to most heterosexual women, high status men are attractive. A lot of advice is about getting higher status, or about faking some signals that high-status men send. (Actually, getting higher status or faking it, is not a dichotomy. Sometimes status is in the eyes of the beholder: if you convince people that you have high status, you have it. Also, faking the high status can make you more confident, and when you learn to be confident, you will get high status naturally.) Wise people will remind you that becoming a high-status male will also help you in other areas of life, unrelated to seduction, so perhaps instead of becoming better at seduction you should frame it as becoming better at life. -- Add some specific tricks and fixes here, and you have a typical PUA material.
Problem is that the typical PUA material is optimized for short-term relationships. For someone starting from “no relationships” position, that is a huge improvement. But to get a long-term relationship, another lesson has to be learned. Some male traits are attractive for short-term relationships, some male traits are attractive for long-term relationship. The official story says they are the same, which is wrong (but socially useful). Reversing this stupidity, a typical PUA in a valley of bad rationality says they are opposites to each other, which is also wrong. In reality, they are approximately orthogonal. For short-term relationship you need “alpha” traits: to be strong, successful, healthy; in other words, to show you have good genes. For long-term relationships you need “beta” traits: to be kind, reasonable, faithful; in other words, to show you would be a good father. These are not the same, and these are not opposites—when you fully understand this, everything else is just a commentary. Statistically, young women will put more emphasis on “alpha” traits (which is why PUAs focus on that), but as they get older, they realize the importance of “beta” traits. Men are socially pressed to develop “beta” traits, because that is the part society needs; but having only “beta” traits without “alpha” traits does not make a man attractive.
This is the root of most misunderstandings: When a man asks: “How to become attractive?” he often means that he starts from zero and cannot get even a short-term relationship; which means he needs to work on his “alpha” traits. However, a women hearing this question will typically interpret it as: “How can an already attractive man become even more attractive?”, she imagines a typical attractive bad boy, and recommends adding some “beta” traits to that. This is why this kind of communication predictably fails, and then it leads to endless flamewars about whether women really want or don’t want “nice guys”. The answer is: Women want attractive men to develop “beta” traits; but there is a silent assumption that those men already have “alpha” traits. Women don’t want men with zero “alpha” traits, regardless of how much “beta” traits they have.
Considering that in Western society, the man is traditionally the pursuer and the woman the pursued
A more accurate way of putting that is that the man is the first to break plausible deniability. If you also take into account non-verbal, indirect signals (where if the recipient isn’t interested they can just pretend to not notice and nothing bad happens), most of the times the very first move is the woman’s, both according to this report about Britain and in my experience in both Italy and Ireland: I can’t say I can recall ever getting a positive reaction from approaching a woman who wasn’t already smiling at me. Now, a guy who has good social skills but poor introspection may only approach women who are smiling at them but not be consciously aware that he’s preselecting women that way; likewise, a socially savvy but not introspectively savvy woman may not be consciously aware that she’s smiling at the guy she likes; as a result, it feels to them like it’s the man who’s initiating the interaction, which I guess is the main cause of that confusion.
With people you already know, the kinds of indirect signals (where if the recipient isn’t interested they can just pretend to not notice and nothing bad happens) are different (and not all of them are entirely non-verbal), but otherwise the same kind-of applies.
I think I know it when I see them (at least some of the time—there might be more of them that I’m not noticing), but I can’t think of a good intensional description of them (and it doesn’t seem polite to me to point at extensional examples based on actual people, even in anonymized form).
It probably also depends on what common knowledge exists or does not exist among the two of you, incl. what culture you’re in.
To be fair, I have filtered the reasonable parts of PUA. There is also a lot of crap. And most of the focus is on the short-term relationship—the ending part is based solely on “Married Man Sex Life”. (I guess that reflects the needs of a typical customer—and perhaps even a typical PUA guru. Also, the society does give rather decent advice on “beta” traits; the “alpha” is the missing part, so teaching it is more popular and profitable.)
you seem to be arguing that the core tenet of PUA is “women are attracted to status”. The problem is that this isn’t a secret at all.
Yeah, this is difficult to explain (so outside view suggests I am prone to rationalization here). I agree with the examples you gave. And yet… the society gives contradictory and incomplete information on this. Consider saying: “If you have an expensive foreign car, you are more likely to get pretty girls.” Say it at one place, and you will get: “Duh, news at 11.” Say it at another place, and you will get: “You sexist! How dare you! Not all women are like that. Bringing an expensive car would never impress me.”
So we have two separate magisteria here. In one universe, you only get girls by being bold and rich. In other universe, you only get girls by being polite and patient. Both messages are given by the society, none of them is literally a secret. Yet they seem contradictory, and how to successfully put them together, that is kind of a secret. Because people living in one universe typically deny the existence of the other universe.
Perhaps the information is all out there, in pieces, but you need some level of social skills to put it all correctly together. Judging by the popularity of PUAs, many people lack this skill. I certainly did.
Everyone knows that the cool jocks get the girls and the nerds don’t.
I guess the nerds would appreciate a more precise advice; which parts of jocks’ behavior are necessary for the desired effect, and which can be left out. Which is the 20% that brings 80% of the result. Otherwise, the price is too high. PUA explains how to get some of what jocks get, without having to become a full-time jock.
Perhaps the key is to be rational enough to take the next step and actually decide to either become or fake becoming higher status … Or just deciding that it’s not worth the effort.
If you map says that higher status is not actually important, that it is mostly sought by insecure or evil people, and is not really worth sacrificing your life to get it… then the rational choice is to ignore it. If your map says that higher status will improve your life in almost all aspects, and that the first steps to improve it are rather easy… then the rational choice is to go for it. So you need to get your map right to make the right decision.
The problem with PUA is that it all seems very clearly designed for attracting strangers, and consequently uses a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
There is no need to go high-risk all the time. In some situations (a disco with a hundred pretty girls, you don’t care about any one in particular, you don’t mind dozens of rejections), high-risk, high-reward strategy is the best one. In other situations, tone down appropriately. There will always be some risk, because willingness to risk is an important “alpha” trait. (But keeping the risk reasonably low is an important “beta” trait.)
Basically I wish someone could just tell me the socially acceptable, standard strategy that the people around me use, and then after I gain a better understanding of it, maybe I can tweak it as I see fit.
A new strategy is better tested on strangers. The people who already know you, will not react to your new strategy per se, but to your change. And people usually perceive change negatively; it disrupts social order. The stranger sees your new strategy and thinks this is what you are—so you get a better response on what your future relationships would be if you became that.
And yes, you have to tweak all the advice to fit your personality. Also, while experimenting, you may discover traits you didn’t know you had. Some of them good, some of them bad. You will have to deal with it too.
I would recommend you to find a torrent of “The Blueprint Decoded”, watch it, go meet some new people, and do the experiments you feel (emotionally and ethically) comfortable with. Be just a little more courageous than you usually are, and notice how other people react to you, and how you feel inside once you become comfortable with it. Don’t try too much at once. For example, if you have problem starting a conversation with a stranger, then during the first week consider successfully starting a conversation a victory. Don’t push too far on the first try; you would sabotage yourself by converting every victory to a defeat.
EDIT: As a new environment with lot of girls, may I recommend dancing lessons? ;)
I’m going to be starting college in the fall, so that obviously gives me a new environment with lots of girls...
The more incentive to develop the skills before the college. You are right that if you approach ten girls every night in the same environment, sooner or later someone will notice. I would suggest training your skills somewhere else, and use the interaction in college only to maintain the level you already have. -- For example if you are uncomfortable making eye contact, train it somewhere else, but when you become comfortable with it, do it every day at the college to strenghten the habit. -- If you change your college behavior slowly and without obvious effort, people won’t notice. It will be just “growing up”.
Not to mention that I can’t just magically make myself not feel shame.
I recommend two powerful branches of modern magic, called “reductionism” and “conditioning”. The first one can literally crush mountains to sand, the second one can be used by a wizard to transform themselves. The most successful school of these branches is CBT.
What exactly makes you feel shame? What words do you hear or what video do you see in your mind when you consider talking to an attractive girl? First step, write it down, in as much detail as you can (not publicly). For example: “If I say ‘hello’ to a girl, she will run away screaming / start laughing at me / coldly ignore me / call the cops.” (Merely writing it down helps to dispell the magic, because you notice how silly it is.) Second step, try to trace when and how did this idea get into your mind, and what evidence do you have about its literal truth. Was it said or suggested to you by someone when you were 10 years old? What is the probability that the person (a) had a correct model of the world, (b) had a motivation at given moment to give you a literally correct information, and (c) you understood and remembered it perfectly? Or it is something that happened to you in the past? Are there some specific things about (a) you, (b) the person you are going to interact with, (c) the environment, that have changed? Third step, make a statistics: Take a notebook, make a specific prediction, do the experiment, note the results. Out of 10 approaches, what happened how often?
If something is difficult, try splitting it into smaller pieces, and train it piece by piece. Asking “what time is it now?” is easier and shorter than having a conversation. Making eye contact and smiling for half a second is even easier. But perhaps smiling at a photograph or an imaginary person could be even easier. Even the smile, or more precisely the causal chain in your brain that naturally makes you smile, can be analyzed. Is there a pleasant thought that is likely to make you smile? (Imagine lying at the beach, observing the wide sky under the warm sun.) Try smiling alone, perhaps lying relaxed on your bed, until you feel pleasant doing it. Then smile at photographs, at real people not looking at you, at real people looking at you, starting with the people you know. (Note: If someone asks you why you smile, just say: “I just have a great day” and stop there.) For a successully completed task, reward yourself with an M&M.
Creepiness is a really hard concept to deal with. … PUA-y stuff saying “men being passionate and clear about their intentions is attractive” … poorly socially calibrated might do something creepy like writing someone in his class he’s talked to a few times a long Facebook message confessing his feelings for her
I think the essence of creepiness is the victim’s (real or perceived) inability to easily stop the interaction. The PUA attitude is like: “girl, if you want, my bed is over there and I don’t have any mental problem about doing it like rabbits… but if you don’t want, I am perfectly okay with that, too; there are other girls who will be happy to get this offer, and meanwhile, we can talk, but we also don’t have to”. Of course not using those words; this is just the internal model of the world. Clear about: yes, I am a healthy human male. Clear about: you are given the opportunity, but the choice is yours.
On the other hand “confessing feelings” is probably kind of creepy at almost every context. It works only if the girl is at the given moment 100% sure she wants you (and you are so biased to overestimate this), or if you are a fictional Hollywood hero and her positive response is in the script. Rule of thumb: Don’t do it, except if the girl does it first, and even then don’t make it stronger than she did. Otherwise it can go like: “Oh, this guy needs me so much, but I am not completely sure about him… and maybe I will later decide I don’t want him… and maybe then he will do something creepy… so perhaps I should play it safe and get rid of him before he gets even more attached.” Not having an easy opportunity to leave, if you decide to, is also creepy. -- Also, if you make a social mistake, leaving a written proof makes it much worse.
There are some PUA techniques to reduce creepiness, for example by introducing an artificial limit like: “Hi—oh, I am so sorry I must leave within a minute to catch my train—but I just noticed you and really wanted to say hello.” Properly done, the girl now feels no pressure (unless something else is wrong). Of course, you should then leave as promised. (Advanced version: Or have a very credible excuse.) Also, you can send similar signals with your body language; don’t lean towards the girl, don’t even turn your body against her, only your head. She must feel free to leave; and if she does, you must accept it calmly, preferably with a smile. To keep your mind in the proper state, relax and congratulate yourself for starting the conversation. And eat an M&M. And remember that if she left without any obstacles, she is more likely to talk with you again, perhaps for a longer time.
Note: Feel free to punch me if I talk about dancing lessons too much, but it is a social activity where it is socially okay and even required to touch girls. ;) The idea is to become comfortable with non-zero contact. Actually, for really good ballroom dancing, rather intimate contact is required; but let the girl decide how much is okay for her. It will still be more than zero. To avoid creepiness, make it obvious you expect only one dance at a time from the girl. Then lead her back to her chair, smile, compliment her dancing, and say: thank you. (Rule of thumb: Don’t make her send you away or escape from you; leave first.)
I am sure that there are socially acceptable ways to show a girl your attraction that would 80% of the time end up with you not being given the creepy label, regardless of whether or not she reciprocates.
She does something interesting. You approach her (don’t go directly to her, just around her), make eye contact, smile, compliment her on what she did, and leave immediately (if possible, don’t go back, continue in approximately the same direction). Repeat 20 times (with different girls, in different situations).
“creepy” is also one of the most common critiques people give of PUA
Selection bias: If a PUA does something wrong, people think: “This was a creepy PUA”. If a PUA does something right, people think: “This was a charming young man.” Attribution error: If you attend a seminar, then smile at a strange girl and say hello, your friends will think: “He never did this before, but after the seminar he keeps smiling at strange girls and saying hello, that’s creepy.” Everyone else will think: “He is a nice and happy guy.” Confirmation bias: If someone has already decided that you are creepy, anything you do will seem creepy to them. -- Therefore, if you learn and use PUA stuff, don’t say it to people around you, because then you will get feedback about their models of PUA, not about what you do. (In the worst case they could start punishing all your social behavior. Like, you would do something nice and social that you would have done before too, and they would say: please stop doing this PUA stuff all the time, it’s creepy.)
A thought experiment: Imagine than in another universe I would write here on LW exactly the same information and advice, but I would start with the following disclaimer: -- “Please don’t ever do PUA. PUA is creepy and it is for losers. It is evil and should be illegal. How about just naturally being yourself, being nice and polite and attractive? Why are guys so opposed to doing that? Are they afraid that they would lose their masculinity? No, that is a patriachal nonsense. Actually, here is some advice from my feminist friends about how to become a real man: …”—and then I would follow with all the PUA advice, just being very careful not to ever mention “PUA” or any PUA slang (e.g. “alpha” and “beta”), and to always frame it like: This is how you become a good man (connotationally: good doggie) and make women happier (because that is the only thing that truly matters). Would such version be more socially acceptable? Oh, it certainly would; it would show everyone that I am a good Blue, not an evil Green. So why don’t I do it? Well, I am stubborn; and I consider it intellectually dishonest to use someone’s knowledge without giving them the proper credit. I am not saying PUAs invented this all, but they certainly widely popularized it. They are the ones who tried to help the low-status male, before it became profitable. I have no problem with using other sources of information on the same topic, as long as the information is useful; I just didn’t find any.
Maybe we can charitably extend your definition to include not taking no for an answer, since people feel social pressure to not cut off a conversation halfway through.
Yes, ‘not taking “no” for an answer’ is very creepy!
Maybe we can charitably extend your definition to include not taking no for an answer, since people feel social pressure to not cut off a conversation halfway through.
Note also that people vary a lot in their propensity to say no in spite of pressure to the contrary, so if you’re someone who hardly ever has much trouble with that and you generalize from one example...
(I’ve recently seen lots of anecdotal evidence that ‘if she hasn’t withdrawn from the interaction, she must be enjoying it’ isn’t a viable heuristic for certain people.)
If there is a web discussion about something, people naturally extend the meaning of something. Let’s take LW for an obvious example: It started with epistemic rationality, and expanded even to rational toothpaste.
So by the same mechanism, I would expect that if you make a web community discussing “creepiness”, the scope will naturally grow. -- The example you linked doesn’t seem creepy to me, assuming it was on a dating website. (A context could make it creepy: for example if the same man keeps sending this message repeatedly to the same woman.)
You know, haters gonna hate. Try avoiding the obvious haters, and don’t leave written records that could fall in wrong hands.
I guess a proper protocol for dating a schoolmate is to invite them somewhere outside of the school (some interesting place, or for a walk). In school, just be friendly. This way you leave an obvious exit. Also, the girl may appreciate your discretion.
How does talking to a girl for only one minute help you?
If you are nervous about approaching strange girls, the time limit also reduces your stress. Gradually you will start feeling relaxed while doing it. That is the time to approach someone else without using the time limit.
Is this for practice or for results? Am I doing this on strangers or on people I know?
Always start with easy and progress to more difficult. Start complimenting the people you know, and progress to strangers. The more you do it, the more “natural” it will feel to you. (I use scare quotes around “natural”, because “natural” simply means: learned and practiced long time ago, and “not natural” means: learned yesterday, have not practice yet. You become “natural” by practice, not by being born with the ability.) At first just practice, but with enough experience you will learn the scale of reactions, when people are just polite and when they are really happy… and then at some moment, when you get a happy reaction, you can ask whether it is okay to talk.
Sorry, the advice ends here—this is not a PUA forum, and some people don’t like this topic. I hope I made you interested, and perhaps provided a good starting map. Many specific answers and new ideas are in the books. As usual, use your brain. If something feels morally wrong or dangerous, don’t do it. But if something merely feels uncomfortable, expand your comfort zone; do it slowly, but do it. You can’t learn social skills by discussing them online. You have to practice. With practice, it will become easier. Don’t mention “PUA” to people, and feel free to ignore any bullshit. Just be aware that a lot of advice you get from traditional sources is also bullshit. Explore the territory, don’t just copy other people’s maps. Do it sooner rather than later, because then you will have more time to enjoy the gains.
I guess a proper protocol for dating a schoolmate is to invite them somewhere outside of the school (some interesting place, or for a walk). In school, just be friendly. This way you leave an obvious exit. Also, the girl may appreciate your discretion.
This actually makes a lot of sense. “Only show attraction to girls outside of school/work, so that they are aware that you compartmentalize your life in such a way that they will not have to deal with the topic of romance with you at school/work if they are not inclined to do so.” This is why at a school dance it’s okay to go and rub your crotch on the butt of a girl you treat completely non-sexually during the day.
EDIT: And now the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace makes a lot more sense.
Sorry, the advice ends here—this is not a PUA forum, and some people don’t like this topic.
That’s fine, I understand that you probably have better things to do. Thank you for the advice/discussion, and good luck in your future endeavors. :)
“Only show attraction to girls outside of school/work, so that they are aware that you compartmentalize your life in such a way that they will not have to deal with the topic of romance with you at school/work if they are not inclined to do so.”
That’s pretty much what I do instinctively, except that the compartments are more gerrymandered than that (and they’re not much clearer to my System 2 than (say) grammatical rules), and they depend on who the woman is (and, to a lesser extent, on what we’re talking about) but not much on where we are (e.g., with some people I’ll do the hover hand thing in pictures, with others I’m perfectly comfortable putting a hand on their thigh during class).
(This might be part of a same pattern as Feynman’s observation that it’s common for European physicists to talk about their work in bars but rare for American physicists.)
The example you linked doesn’t seem creepy to me, assuming it was on a dating website. (A context could make it creepy: for example if the same man keeps sending this message repeatedly to the same woman.)
Actually, I think the lack of context makes it creepier.
Being that explicit so early in a conversation is usually considered impolite. (There’s no need to explicitly mention the bedroom—they’re on a dating site, she knows you mean that even if you just say you want to hang out.) Therefore, it demonstrates a lack of familiarity with politeness norms, and possibly with social interactions in general. In more usual contexts, it would instead demonstrate that you can afford flouting politeness rules without much of a status hit, but when you’re talking to someone who knows basically nothing about you other than what you’re communicating at the moment (for all she knows, you could be a sexual predator, a dork who basically never talks to women in meatspace, or even an uFAI), countersignalling is a bad idea.
Also, it pattern-matches a kind of guy who gets very resentful, sometimes in a scary way, when he doesn’t get his way. (And for some reason they seem to always be awful at writing—“your beautiful”, “knew to the area”...)
Not necessarily—there are things I used to never do when sober because I assumed I would regret them, then I once did them when drunk, noticed that the (social) consequences weren’t anywhere near as negative as I had feared and were in fact quite positive, and now I often do them even when I’m sober.
Considering that in Western society, the man is traditionally the pursuer and the woman the pursued, this seems non-ideal,
What do you care what the traditional roles in Western society are, so long as you’re both happy?
and considering that my male friends say stuff like “I’m going to go for Susan tonight”
What fraction of the time do they succeed? (And when they do, how do you know that part of the reason why they had picked Susan rather than Jane in the first place was that on some level they already knew that they had less of a chance with the latter than with the former?)
What do you care what the traditional roles in Western society are, so long as you’re both happy?
Presumably if women rarely initiate and instead expect men to approach them, a man who frequently approaches women will be much more likely to find sex/a relationship than a man who just waits around for women to do the initiating.
What fraction of the time do they succeed?
I don’t know. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. But I am sure they succeed more than they would if, like me, they never tried.
(And when they do, how do you know that part of the reason why they had picked Susan rather than Jane in the first place was that on some level they already knew that they had less of a chance with the latter than with the former?)
OK, I thought you meant something like “I used to be in a relationship, but it had been initiated by the woman, which is untraditional; we were uncomfortable with that, and eventually we broke up as a result”, rather than “I used to be in a relationship, then for whatever reason we broke up, but I hadn’t been the one to initiate it so I don’t know how to initiate another one”; never mind. (I have heard a few women make the latter complaint before, though none of them mentioned the traditional roles.)
Are you happy with the number and quality of relationships? Your dubiousness about not initiating seemed to be about it seeming weird rather than practical drawbacks.
The specifically male preferences are widely known (all those half-naked ladies on the covers of magazines didn’t get there by accident). The specifically female preferences are somewhat less known. Why? Consider the incentives: Women prefer to keep this mysterious, because mysterious means higher status. (This is why any attempt to explain the mystery feels like a status attack.) Men who understand them have no incentive to teach it to their competitors. And the men who want to learn, must first get a huge status hit by admitting that they need to learn.
This is not an actual explanation of the asymmetry—why do men prefer to keep their preference mysterious less than women prefer to keep theirs mysterious? why do women have less of a disincentive to teach men’s preferences to their competitors than men do?
Some male traits are attractive for short-term relationships, some male traits are attractive for long-term relationship. The official story says they are the same, which is wrong (but socially useful).
Which official story? People preferring (brutally simplifying while trying to stay polite) to marry older, richer people but to sleep with younger, sexier people isn’t that rare a trope as far as I can tell.
My impression is that there are many different shades with respect to this, ranging from ‘explicitly learning social skills which others may learn implicitly’ to ‘behaviour intended to trick, force, pressure, or otherwise outright manipulate girls into bed with you’ - with a great deal in between.
A woman’s mostly negative take on PUA, though she thinks that a little PUA can be useful for men who are afraid to talk to women. Getting into the PUA sub-culture can leave men worse off.
Both have put a lot of thought into it.
My take is that PUA seems to be set in a universe where no one likes anyone else.
Funny thing is that I agree with the first article, I just have completely different connotations to that.
Yes, the stuff Mystery teaches really is dumbed down. Which is good, because some guys start so dumb that they need this; sometimes they have problems to understand even this. I was there once. And the stuff helped me to get out of there.
It feels to me like saying: “The elementary schools are so dumb, I learned much more at university!”—Sure, good for you! Also, well-played sir; you gently reminded us of your higher status. The competition among PUA bloggers is strong these days; many authors have to market themself as beyond-PUA to be able to sell their PUA products. (Nothing wrong about that, I would probably do the same thing if I weren’t too lazy to blog.)
I also agree with the rest of the article. If you take a mentally unstable person and teach them PUA, you will get a mentally unstable person with some PUA skills. And therefore… I mean, if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them Java programming, you will get a mentally unstable person with some Java skills. Perhaps it is socially unresponsible to teach mentally unstable people anything that increases their powers without fixing their problems first. But that is not a problem specific to PUA industry.
My take is that PUA seems to be set in a universe where no one likes anyone else.
Men helping low-status men to overcome their lack of social skills… is an evidence that no one likes anyone else? (Ten years ago, the help was provided online for free, only later it developed into a profitable industry.)
But they don’t focus on liking women, do they? Well, they often don’t. To make a fair comparison, how often do seduction (sorry, relationship) articles, magazines, and books for women talk about liking men, respecting their agency, et cetera?
And maybe the people criticizing PUAs just focus too much on the bad parts, and ignore the nicer parts. But I admit the bad parts may be majority of the stuff.
I also agree with the rest of the article. If you take a mentally unstable person and teach them PUA, you will get a mentally unstable person with some PUA skills. And therefore… I mean, if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them Java programming, you will get a mentally unstable person with some Java skills.
And if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them to use a weapon, you will get a mentally unstable person with some weapon-using skills. This may be more undesirable than a mentally unstable person with some Java skills.
This isn’t necessarily not less undesirable than a mentally unstable person with some Java skills. [reads again to make sure to have said the right thing without getting farblondjet by the quadruple negation]
On reading that again one month later… I indeed got that wrong. Edited to say it like a normal person.
I still think that the benefits of publishing PUA advice are probably higher than the costs, but it would be difficult to defend this claim. (We would need to get data: how many clueless frustrated guys finally got their relationships right; how many naive girls were pumped and dumped by mentally unstable guys with pickup skills; the further impact of both on the society; etc. And even then we would have to make a value judgement about how much we care about a damsel in distress versus an expendable low-status male.)
The first link said that PUA could leave people in worse shape than it found them—and Clarisse Thorn (second link) said the same.
Good point about PUA cultivating friendships between men. I’d missed that part. Still, it doesn’t do a good job of encouraging friendliness between romantic/sexual partners.
it doesn’t do a good job of encouraging friendliness between romantic/sexual partners.
Compared with… relationship advice for women? (For example: don’t call him and rarely return his calls; stop dating him if he doesn’t buy you a romantic gift for your birthday or valentine’s day; don’t see him more than once or twice a week). How much of the PUA criticism—that it helps narcissist people develop their sense of grandiosity and become emotional vampires—applies to that, too? Perhaps the narcissism is more socially acceptable for women, because… uhm… yay, women! ?
Could we agree on a gender-neutral version that literature about “success” in relationships typically does not do a good job of encouraging friendliness between romantic/sexual partners? (And of course, there are always a few exceptions.)
(Or perhaps even more generally that literature about maximizing X does not do a good job at maximizing Y?)
That’s a reasonable question. However, I have no idea to what extent women take The Rules seriously, while there’s a lot of evidence that some fraction of the men here take PUA very seriously.
How about avoiding labels completely, and asking directly about behavior? Let’s make gender-neutral or gender-reversed questions for men and women, taboo all jargon, and see how many of them will report using the given strategy.
For example: “Do you sometimes pretend to be unavailable, even if you have free time, just to make yourself more scarce?” Or: “If the person you are dating becomes too proud of themselves, do you slightly criticize them in order to bring them back to earth?”
A woman can learn gender-reversed versions of some PUA advice from a magazine or hear it from her friends; she does not have to identify with any label. And she does not have to read any specific book, because all the information is already out there. Advice for women about manipulating men is generally not shocking and controversial. “The Rules” is a book that strongly pattern-matches PUA advice (a name similar to “The Game”, simplistic bullet-point advice), which was probably intentional, to create controversy and increase sales… but it’s not like women never read the specific ideas before in other books and magazines. (Okay, this one is probably new: “Don’t Discuss The Rules with Your Therapist”.)
Thank you for the links! I will most likely read the first link at some point, and maybe the second one eventually.
(From the about page of the blog linked to:)
This is a site dedicated to observing and analyzing human behavior and the nature of social interactions. Theories about why we do the things we do in relationships, the workplace, with strangers, in nightclubs and bars or anywhere people socialize and try to get along.
WOW, I have been looking for a website like this for a few months now. Again, thank you!
I don’t have much experience with club dancing, but at the few occasions, I was there with a girl who I previously danced ballroom-style with, and we mostly danced jive or quickstep or cha-cha, just with shorter steps to take less space and not move across the room. We had fun, and the feedback from other people was positive.
But even with the club-type dancing, somehow it got much easier for me once I became good at ballroom dances. Maybe I got more confident, maybe I learned to follow the rhythm, maybe I started to understand some movement patterns; probably all of that together.
A big problem I have with club dancing is that I am 6′6″, and I feel (probably at least somewhat accurately) that I am unusually visible and that any move I do is being judged by at least a few people. So I end up just standing there, then immediately realizing “this is much more awkward than dancing really poorly is”, then concluding “Oh my god, no matter what I do I am doomed, I have to get out of here right now”, then leaving, then sitting alone feeling like there is something very flawed about me.
I will get over this someday by applying a dedicated effort, but right now there are more important self-improvement projects. Until then I just will stay far away from any dance where I can’t get drunk beforehand.
Well, I agree that it needn’t be at the top of your to-do list. In fact, I’m not sure you need worry about getting over it at all, really. Not enjoying hanging out/dancing in clubs is no serious character defect, and plenty of people share your preference. By the way, happy birthday (or was that yesterday?)
club dancing is basically doing whatever you feel like to the beat. This is a lot easier if you have a repertoire of moves from other styles of dance or activity that you can instantiate. Also what Villiam_Bur said.
Practice Practice Practice Practice Practice. You have to go out of your way to hang out with people to get any good at being fun to hang out with. WARNING: This does not mean you have to spend time at loud parties or bars or clubs. While they pretend to be areas for socializing, they’re not really. It’s one thing if you enjoy dancing or drinking, but places that are less loud and crowded are a lot better for conversation.
I’ve done this and it didn’t really work. Maybe it worked a little, but not at a very fast rate. To be honest, I think reading a small amount of social skills stuff and thinking about how to solve the problem a little helped much more than all the “practice” I’ve done in the last year or so.
Obviously you can’t take this to the extreme and expect that you can instantly go from Michael Cera to Casanova just by sitting alone reading stuff and watching videos in your room, but I don’t think the statement “If you spend enough time in social interactions, you will inevitably develop good social skills” is at all true either.
I kind of despise the former and love the latter. :\
Did you try dancing lessons?
I hated dancing before I learned it, but I love it now. I am very bad at “learning by copying others”, but with good explicit education I became a decent dancer.
(Note: Almost everyone adviced me against explicit learning, because they said it wouldn’t be “natural” or “romantic”. I ignored all this advice, and now no one complains about the result. Contrary to predictions, learning the steps explicitly helped me to improvise later. Seems like people just have a strong taboo about applying reductionism to romantic activities like dancing.)
Interesting; no one has ever told me that dancing lessons are a bad idea. I think we live in very different cultures. (Other things you have said in the past have also given me his impression.)
No, no, no, this was a bad explanation on my part. No one told me that dancing lessons are bad idea per se… only that my specific learning style is.
This is what works best for me: Show me the moves. Now show me those moves again very slowly, beat by beat. Show me separately what feet do; then what hands and head do. Tell me at which moment which leg supports the weight (I don’t see it, and it is important). When and how exactly do I signal to my girl what is expected from her. (In some rare situations, to get it, I need to try her movements, too.) I still don’t get it, but be patient with me. Let me repeat the first beat, and tell me what was wrong. Again, until it is right. Then the second beat. Etc. Then the whole thing together. Now let’s do the same thing again, and again, and again, exactly the same way. Then something “clicks” in my head, and I get the move… and since that moment I can lead, improvise, talk during dance, whatever. -- As a beginner I was blessed with a partner who didn’t run away screaming somewhere in the middle of this. Later my learning became faster, partially because I learned to ask the proper questions. And I had a good luck to dancing teacher who was a former engineer, so he was able to comply with my strange demands.
In contrast, this is what seems to me a typical learning process, at the dancing lessons: Teacher shows the steps quickly. Then shows the steps quickly again. And again. At this moment people in the room start getting it, and they do it halfway correctly. And the more they do it, the better they get.
This absolutely does not work for me. I can learn to do things slowly; but I can’t learn then quickly, not even approximately. I can progress from “slowly but correctly” to “quickly but correctly”, but I can’t progress from “incorrectly” to “correctly” at any speed by mere repetition and observation. Most people seem to have this ability to copy each other. I don’t. I need to be explained the mechanism, step by step. (And this is not just in dancing. Sorry for touching an irrelevant taboo topic, but the PUA literature did exactly the same thing for me about human relations. Despite all the biases et cetera, that was the only source that told me explicitly what most humans learn by copying and probably never bother to explain in a way comprehensive to me.)
Now, after seeing my learning style, the typical reaction was that I should stop doing that, because my dancing style will be ugly and “robotic”, and my partners will feel uncomfotable. Instead I should just do what other people are doing, for a very long time. Wrong in both aspects. First, doing what other people do, just for a longer time, sometimes does not work for me. My head just works differently, or something. Second, after the moment the moves “click” in my head, my dancing becomes okay. If you didn’t see me at the beginning, you would not expect I had so much trouble learning that. Actually, I got feedback from new partners that I dance better than average, and that I am very good at leading. I can teach a girl a new dance in 5 minutes and then lead her so that no one expects she is doing this for the first time. -- This is the other side of how my head works: It takes me a lot of time to understand something, but then I can explain it extremely quickly. (Again, this is not just in dancing. I used to teach maths privately, and the results were good. Many people can do math, but can’t teach it. Although I didn’t have the same kind of problem learning maths, probably because it already is pretty explicit.)
Now, that’s about the only possible way to learn to play anything non-trivial on instruments such as the guitar; therefore, these people
believe that all guitar music is ugly and robotic, or
have no idea of how people learn to play, or
are confused and/or talking through their asses (e.g. some part of them deep down is saying ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’)
(not necessarily with probabilities within an order of magnitude of each other).
I completely agree with you (which is why I persisted in my learning style). From my experience it seems to me many people are confused like this.
Possible explanation: We learn some things by copying or early in childhood, and we learn some other things explicitly. I guess this makes many people think that skills are divided to “explicitly teachable” and “explicitly unteachable”, using some heuristics, such as: “if it is usually learned at school, it is teachable”, “if I tried to learn it and failed, it is unteachable”, “it is teachable only if I perfectly understand how it works”, etc.
It probably adds to confusion that we don’t see how other people learned their skills. Similarly to attribution fallacy, if we see someone good at doing X, it is easier to assume that it is a part of their nature, not a learned skill. (And those people may support us in this opinion, for example because it discourages the competition.) Seems to me this is pretty frequent in art. Also, sometimes the idea of “unteachable skill” is a good excuse for not learning and doing something.
Even those people who learned e.g. playing guitar may not propagate the idea automatically to other aspects of their lives.
Sometimes people don’t see how they themselves learned something. When you ask them, they confabulate empty phrases like “it’s a knack”, or “eventually you just get it”, or the like. They generally suck at explaining. So, ignore them and move on.
I was assuming that those people had themselves learned to dance at some point, so unless it was a very long time ago and/or they suck at introspection they knew how they did it. If you were talking about people who didn’t themselves know how to dance, then replace ‘people who cannot learn to dance the way I did don’t deserve to get the social status I got from it’ with ‘I’m jealous those people can dance and I can’t, but I can’t be bothered to learn it myself, so in order to put them down I’ll tell them that their grapes are sour’.
Maybe there are two learning styles—copying and explicit—each of them having their set of advantages and disadvantages. (Perhaps an analogy to System 1 and System 2.)
Learning by copying is faster and it does not require cooperation from the person you copy. On the other hand, copying is imperfect, and you cannot copy what you don’t see. Learning explicitly is slower and requires a good explanation; which requires a good introspection from the person who explains.
So maybe this is an instance of “the last will be first”. -- People who are good at learning by copying, use learning by copying as their favorite learning style. People who are bad at learning by copying can compensate by focusing on explicit learning.
Under these assumptions, the “copying” people have a fast start, because many activities are simple and can be learned by copying. Then when it comes to more complex activities, they usually continue copying, get some mediocre results, and stop there. And even there, they probably get those mediocre results faster than an “explicit” person. -- They really believe that learning by copying is superior, because this is what worked for them. Learning explicitly is just a strange ritual done at school; and I suspect that even there they try to copy the teachers.
On the other hand, “explicit” people learn slowly and are completely dependent on good learning materials. Sometimes the good materials are available, and allow them to reach mastery in complex things. The whole school system is designed for this. Sometimes the materials are unavailable or misleading (e.g. because the topic is mindkilling), and they are lost. These are the “book smart” people. -- They believe in explicit learning, because this is what worked for them.
These are just extreme descriptions, I guess most people use learning by copying in some areas and explicit learning in other areas. They may have an explanation about which style is better in which situation. There are things that give advantage to one of those styles in a given area: how big inferential distances are there, how visible is the information, how good are available teaching materials. But better teaching materials can be made even in areas where learning by copying has the natural advantage. -- It’s just than in a given area, when most people are satisfied with what they learn by copying, developing techniques for explicit learning may seem unnecessary and “wrong”. This can be more complicated if saying that the copying does not work for you means advertising your low status, so the defense of explicit techniques itself becomes a low-status thing to do, and insisting that those techniques are completely unnecessary becomes a signal of good copying skills and high status.
Sorry for only commenting on the irrelevant taboo topic you touched on, but this is interesting to me. I have been reading some PUA stuff lately and it seems to me that the whole point is that it is not describing something that ordinary humans learn naturally, but instead prescribing something extraordinary that you can do to set yourself apart from the crowd in order to attract the hottest girl in the club that every other guy in there is hitting on. And even then it only works via the law of averages, and requires one to override one’s natural intense aversion to rejection in order to pursue a more rational strategy adapted for a modern world in which you can talk to someone once and never see them again.
Am I wrong about this?
These days PUA refers to so many things that I need to be more specific. The sources that helped me were “The Mystery Method” by Mystery, “How To Become An Alpha Male” by Carlos Xuma, “Married Man Sex Life” by Athol Kay. I would also recommend “The Blueprint Decoded” by RSD.
Yes, there are many sources that only tell you “do this, do that, and if it does not work, just do it again”. I guess this is what most customers want: “Don’t bother me with explanations, just give me a quick fix!” This is how most people approach everything. Well, if there is a demand for something, the market will provide a product. And these days it is a huge business. Ten years ago, it was more like geeks experimenting and sharing their results and opinions… a bit similar to Quantified Self today, just less scientific, and sometimes more narrowly focused.
Overcoming aversion to rejection, doing many approaches to convert given rates of success into greater absolute numbers, doing something extraordinary to stand out of the crowd… those are the fixes. Applied incorrectly they could be even harmful. (Receiving a lot of rejection can make you more resistant, but can also break you. Standing out of the crowd is costly signalling, you need to pay the costs. Doing many approaches may cost you socially.) But there is a theory behind that, and maybe it is not clearly explained, maybe it is not emphasised enough, or maybe it is already obvious to many people, and only a relevation for the most clueless guys like me. (Actually, maybe the explanations are not in the books, but in the related blogs. I don’t remember the exact sources of information. I am only sure that “Married Man Sex Life” contains the theory explicitly.) And I guess for a LW reader familiar with status and reductionism, another part is already known.
Here are a few useful ideas; the essence I got from the books and blogs, but the result may be a compilation of various sources, with a bit of LW lingo --
Humans are biological creatures. Attraction is a causal mechanism, not an unexplainable mystery. That does not mean there are no individual preferences. But the shared preferences are also important, and hugely underestimated.
Sometimes the society gives you wrong explanations, for various reasons: People fail at introspection. People optimize their answers for status, not for truth. The inferential distances between socially savvy and socially clueless is too big, so even a honest and good advice gets misunderstood and misapplied. To some degree, sexual mate selection is a zero-sum game, so there is an incentive to spread bad advice. The social advice is optimized for the needs of society (e.g. preserving the social order), which may be misaligned with your needs (e.g. getting from the bottom of the pecking order to the top). -- Of course, if we go more meta, the PUAs also have incentive (status, money) to give you bad advice. Caveat emptor; just don’t make this a fully general counterargument.
Reproduction strategies of males and females are different. Some things are universally attractive (health, intelligence), but some things are sex-specific, or at least have different weight for each sex. (Yeah, the mandatory disclaimer: Not all people are heterosexual, even the heterosexual people are not all the same, etc. Just don’t miss the forest because some trees are outside of it.) The specifically male preferences are widely known (all those half-naked ladies on the covers of magazines didn’t get there by accident). The specifically female preferences are somewhat less known. Why? Consider the incentives: Women prefer to keep this mysterious, because mysterious means higher status. (This is why any attempt to explain the mystery feels like a status attack.) Men who understand them have no incentive to teach it to their competitors. And the men who want to learn, must first get a huge status hit by admitting that they need to learn. (Even worse, the status hit is guaranteed, but the good advice in return is not, and most likely one will not get good advice.) This changed with the internet subculture of low-status males, where admitting to strangers to be low-status does not cost one socially, and thus the usually taboo topics may be freely explored. (With the commercialization of PUA, the status games are back again.)
Specifically: to most heterosexual women, high status men are attractive. A lot of advice is about getting higher status, or about faking some signals that high-status men send. (Actually, getting higher status or faking it, is not a dichotomy. Sometimes status is in the eyes of the beholder: if you convince people that you have high status, you have it. Also, faking the high status can make you more confident, and when you learn to be confident, you will get high status naturally.) Wise people will remind you that becoming a high-status male will also help you in other areas of life, unrelated to seduction, so perhaps instead of becoming better at seduction you should frame it as becoming better at life. -- Add some specific tricks and fixes here, and you have a typical PUA material.
Problem is that the typical PUA material is optimized for short-term relationships. For someone starting from “no relationships” position, that is a huge improvement. But to get a long-term relationship, another lesson has to be learned. Some male traits are attractive for short-term relationships, some male traits are attractive for long-term relationship. The official story says they are the same, which is wrong (but socially useful). Reversing this stupidity, a typical PUA in a valley of bad rationality says they are opposites to each other, which is also wrong. In reality, they are approximately orthogonal. For short-term relationship you need “alpha” traits: to be strong, successful, healthy; in other words, to show you have good genes. For long-term relationships you need “beta” traits: to be kind, reasonable, faithful; in other words, to show you would be a good father. These are not the same, and these are not opposites—when you fully understand this, everything else is just a commentary. Statistically, young women will put more emphasis on “alpha” traits (which is why PUAs focus on that), but as they get older, they realize the importance of “beta” traits. Men are socially pressed to develop “beta” traits, because that is the part society needs; but having only “beta” traits without “alpha” traits does not make a man attractive.
This is the root of most misunderstandings: When a man asks: “How to become attractive?” he often means that he starts from zero and cannot get even a short-term relationship; which means he needs to work on his “alpha” traits. However, a women hearing this question will typically interpret it as: “How can an already attractive man become even more attractive?”, she imagines a typical attractive bad boy, and recommends adding some “beta” traits to that. This is why this kind of communication predictably fails, and then it leads to endless flamewars about whether women really want or don’t want “nice guys”. The answer is: Women want attractive men to develop “beta” traits; but there is a silent assumption that those men already have “alpha” traits. Women don’t want men with zero “alpha” traits, regardless of how much “beta” traits they have.
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A more accurate way of putting that is that the man is the first to break plausible deniability. If you also take into account non-verbal, indirect signals (where if the recipient isn’t interested they can just pretend to not notice and nothing bad happens), most of the times the very first move is the woman’s, both according to this report about Britain and in my experience in both Italy and Ireland: I can’t say I can recall ever getting a positive reaction from approaching a woman who wasn’t already smiling at me. Now, a guy who has good social skills but poor introspection may only approach women who are smiling at them but not be consciously aware that he’s preselecting women that way; likewise, a socially savvy but not introspectively savvy woman may not be consciously aware that she’s smiling at the guy she likes; as a result, it feels to them like it’s the man who’s initiating the interaction, which I guess is the main cause of that confusion.
Interesting. Although “if she’s smiling at you, she likes you” seems like it wouldn’t hold true when you’re trying to flirt with acquaintances.
With people you already know, the kinds of indirect signals (where if the recipient isn’t interested they can just pretend to not notice and nothing bad happens) are different (and not all of them are entirely non-verbal), but otherwise the same kind-of applies.
Do you know what these indirect signals are? This seems like useful information.
I think I know it when I see them (at least some of the time—there might be more of them that I’m not noticing), but I can’t think of a good intensional description of them (and it doesn’t seem polite to me to point at extensional examples based on actual people, even in anonymized form).
It probably also depends on what common knowledge exists or does not exist among the two of you, incl. what culture you’re in.
To be fair, I have filtered the reasonable parts of PUA. There is also a lot of crap. And most of the focus is on the short-term relationship—the ending part is based solely on “Married Man Sex Life”. (I guess that reflects the needs of a typical customer—and perhaps even a typical PUA guru. Also, the society does give rather decent advice on “beta” traits; the “alpha” is the missing part, so teaching it is more popular and profitable.)
Yeah, this is difficult to explain (so outside view suggests I am prone to rationalization here). I agree with the examples you gave. And yet… the society gives contradictory and incomplete information on this. Consider saying: “If you have an expensive foreign car, you are more likely to get pretty girls.” Say it at one place, and you will get: “Duh, news at 11.” Say it at another place, and you will get: “You sexist! How dare you! Not all women are like that. Bringing an expensive car would never impress me.”
So we have two separate magisteria here. In one universe, you only get girls by being bold and rich. In other universe, you only get girls by being polite and patient. Both messages are given by the society, none of them is literally a secret. Yet they seem contradictory, and how to successfully put them together, that is kind of a secret. Because people living in one universe typically deny the existence of the other universe.
Perhaps the information is all out there, in pieces, but you need some level of social skills to put it all correctly together. Judging by the popularity of PUAs, many people lack this skill. I certainly did.
I guess the nerds would appreciate a more precise advice; which parts of jocks’ behavior are necessary for the desired effect, and which can be left out. Which is the 20% that brings 80% of the result. Otherwise, the price is too high. PUA explains how to get some of what jocks get, without having to become a full-time jock.
If you map says that higher status is not actually important, that it is mostly sought by insecure or evil people, and is not really worth sacrificing your life to get it… then the rational choice is to ignore it. If your map says that higher status will improve your life in almost all aspects, and that the first steps to improve it are rather easy… then the rational choice is to go for it. So you need to get your map right to make the right decision.
There is no need to go high-risk all the time. In some situations (a disco with a hundred pretty girls, you don’t care about any one in particular, you don’t mind dozens of rejections), high-risk, high-reward strategy is the best one. In other situations, tone down appropriately. There will always be some risk, because willingness to risk is an important “alpha” trait. (But keeping the risk reasonably low is an important “beta” trait.)
A new strategy is better tested on strangers. The people who already know you, will not react to your new strategy per se, but to your change. And people usually perceive change negatively; it disrupts social order. The stranger sees your new strategy and thinks this is what you are—so you get a better response on what your future relationships would be if you became that.
And yes, you have to tweak all the advice to fit your personality. Also, while experimenting, you may discover traits you didn’t know you had. Some of them good, some of them bad. You will have to deal with it too.
I would recommend you to find a torrent of “The Blueprint Decoded”, watch it, go meet some new people, and do the experiments you feel (emotionally and ethically) comfortable with. Be just a little more courageous than you usually are, and notice how other people react to you, and how you feel inside once you become comfortable with it. Don’t try too much at once. For example, if you have problem starting a conversation with a stranger, then during the first week consider successfully starting a conversation a victory. Don’t push too far on the first try; you would sabotage yourself by converting every victory to a defeat.
EDIT: As a new environment with lot of girls, may I recommend dancing lessons? ;)
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The more incentive to develop the skills before the college. You are right that if you approach ten girls every night in the same environment, sooner or later someone will notice. I would suggest training your skills somewhere else, and use the interaction in college only to maintain the level you already have. -- For example if you are uncomfortable making eye contact, train it somewhere else, but when you become comfortable with it, do it every day at the college to strenghten the habit. -- If you change your college behavior slowly and without obvious effort, people won’t notice. It will be just “growing up”.
I recommend two powerful branches of modern magic, called “reductionism” and “conditioning”. The first one can literally crush mountains to sand, the second one can be used by a wizard to transform themselves. The most successful school of these branches is CBT.
What exactly makes you feel shame? What words do you hear or what video do you see in your mind when you consider talking to an attractive girl? First step, write it down, in as much detail as you can (not publicly). For example: “If I say ‘hello’ to a girl, she will run away screaming / start laughing at me / coldly ignore me / call the cops.” (Merely writing it down helps to dispell the magic, because you notice how silly it is.) Second step, try to trace when and how did this idea get into your mind, and what evidence do you have about its literal truth. Was it said or suggested to you by someone when you were 10 years old? What is the probability that the person (a) had a correct model of the world, (b) had a motivation at given moment to give you a literally correct information, and (c) you understood and remembered it perfectly? Or it is something that happened to you in the past? Are there some specific things about (a) you, (b) the person you are going to interact with, (c) the environment, that have changed? Third step, make a statistics: Take a notebook, make a specific prediction, do the experiment, note the results. Out of 10 approaches, what happened how often?
If something is difficult, try splitting it into smaller pieces, and train it piece by piece. Asking “what time is it now?” is easier and shorter than having a conversation. Making eye contact and smiling for half a second is even easier. But perhaps smiling at a photograph or an imaginary person could be even easier. Even the smile, or more precisely the causal chain in your brain that naturally makes you smile, can be analyzed. Is there a pleasant thought that is likely to make you smile? (Imagine lying at the beach, observing the wide sky under the warm sun.) Try smiling alone, perhaps lying relaxed on your bed, until you feel pleasant doing it. Then smile at photographs, at real people not looking at you, at real people looking at you, starting with the people you know. (Note: If someone asks you why you smile, just say: “I just have a great day” and stop there.) For a successully completed task, reward yourself with an M&M.
I think the essence of creepiness is the victim’s (real or perceived) inability to easily stop the interaction. The PUA attitude is like: “girl, if you want, my bed is over there and I don’t have any mental problem about doing it like rabbits… but if you don’t want, I am perfectly okay with that, too; there are other girls who will be happy to get this offer, and meanwhile, we can talk, but we also don’t have to”. Of course not using those words; this is just the internal model of the world. Clear about: yes, I am a healthy human male. Clear about: you are given the opportunity, but the choice is yours.
On the other hand “confessing feelings” is probably kind of creepy at almost every context. It works only if the girl is at the given moment 100% sure she wants you (and you are so biased to overestimate this), or if you are a fictional Hollywood hero and her positive response is in the script. Rule of thumb: Don’t do it, except if the girl does it first, and even then don’t make it stronger than she did. Otherwise it can go like: “Oh, this guy needs me so much, but I am not completely sure about him… and maybe I will later decide I don’t want him… and maybe then he will do something creepy… so perhaps I should play it safe and get rid of him before he gets even more attached.” Not having an easy opportunity to leave, if you decide to, is also creepy. -- Also, if you make a social mistake, leaving a written proof makes it much worse.
There are some PUA techniques to reduce creepiness, for example by introducing an artificial limit like: “Hi—oh, I am so sorry I must leave within a minute to catch my train—but I just noticed you and really wanted to say hello.” Properly done, the girl now feels no pressure (unless something else is wrong). Of course, you should then leave as promised. (Advanced version: Or have a very credible excuse.) Also, you can send similar signals with your body language; don’t lean towards the girl, don’t even turn your body against her, only your head. She must feel free to leave; and if she does, you must accept it calmly, preferably with a smile. To keep your mind in the proper state, relax and congratulate yourself for starting the conversation. And eat an M&M. And remember that if she left without any obstacles, she is more likely to talk with you again, perhaps for a longer time.
Note: Feel free to punch me if I talk about dancing lessons too much, but it is a social activity where it is socially okay and even required to touch girls. ;) The idea is to become comfortable with non-zero contact. Actually, for really good ballroom dancing, rather intimate contact is required; but let the girl decide how much is okay for her. It will still be more than zero. To avoid creepiness, make it obvious you expect only one dance at a time from the girl. Then lead her back to her chair, smile, compliment her dancing, and say: thank you. (Rule of thumb: Don’t make her send you away or escape from you; leave first.)
She does something interesting. You approach her (don’t go directly to her, just around her), make eye contact, smile, compliment her on what she did, and leave immediately (if possible, don’t go back, continue in approximately the same direction). Repeat 20 times (with different girls, in different situations).
Selection bias: If a PUA does something wrong, people think: “This was a creepy PUA”. If a PUA does something right, people think: “This was a charming young man.” Attribution error: If you attend a seminar, then smile at a strange girl and say hello, your friends will think: “He never did this before, but after the seminar he keeps smiling at strange girls and saying hello, that’s creepy.” Everyone else will think: “He is a nice and happy guy.” Confirmation bias: If someone has already decided that you are creepy, anything you do will seem creepy to them. -- Therefore, if you learn and use PUA stuff, don’t say it to people around you, because then you will get feedback about their models of PUA, not about what you do. (In the worst case they could start punishing all your social behavior. Like, you would do something nice and social that you would have done before too, and they would say: please stop doing this PUA stuff all the time, it’s creepy.)
A thought experiment: Imagine than in another universe I would write here on LW exactly the same information and advice, but I would start with the following disclaimer: -- “Please don’t ever do PUA. PUA is creepy and it is for losers. It is evil and should be illegal. How about just naturally being yourself, being nice and polite and attractive? Why are guys so opposed to doing that? Are they afraid that they would lose their masculinity? No, that is a patriachal nonsense. Actually, here is some advice from my feminist friends about how to become a real man: …”—and then I would follow with all the PUA advice, just being very careful not to ever mention “PUA” or any PUA slang (e.g. “alpha” and “beta”), and to always frame it like: This is how you become a good man (connotationally: good doggie) and make women happier (because that is the only thing that truly matters). Would such version be more socially acceptable? Oh, it certainly would; it would show everyone that I am a good Blue, not an evil Green. So why don’t I do it? Well, I am stubborn; and I consider it intellectually dishonest to use someone’s knowledge without giving them the proper credit. I am not saying PUAs invented this all, but they certainly widely popularized it. They are the ones who tried to help the low-status male, before it became profitable. I have no problem with using other sources of information on the same topic, as long as the information is useful; I just didn’t find any.
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Yes, ‘not taking “no” for an answer’ is very creepy!
Note also that people vary a lot in their propensity to say no in spite of pressure to the contrary, so if you’re someone who hardly ever has much trouble with that and you generalize from one example...
(I’ve recently seen lots of anecdotal evidence that ‘if she hasn’t withdrawn from the interaction, she must be enjoying it’ isn’t a viable heuristic for certain people.)
If there is a web discussion about something, people naturally extend the meaning of something. Let’s take LW for an obvious example: It started with epistemic rationality, and expanded even to rational toothpaste.
So by the same mechanism, I would expect that if you make a web community discussing “creepiness”, the scope will naturally grow. -- The example you linked doesn’t seem creepy to me, assuming it was on a dating website. (A context could make it creepy: for example if the same man keeps sending this message repeatedly to the same woman.)
You know, haters gonna hate. Try avoiding the obvious haters, and don’t leave written records that could fall in wrong hands.
I guess a proper protocol for dating a schoolmate is to invite them somewhere outside of the school (some interesting place, or for a walk). In school, just be friendly. This way you leave an obvious exit. Also, the girl may appreciate your discretion.
If you are nervous about approaching strange girls, the time limit also reduces your stress. Gradually you will start feeling relaxed while doing it. That is the time to approach someone else without using the time limit.
Always start with easy and progress to more difficult. Start complimenting the people you know, and progress to strangers. The more you do it, the more “natural” it will feel to you. (I use scare quotes around “natural”, because “natural” simply means: learned and practiced long time ago, and “not natural” means: learned yesterday, have not practice yet. You become “natural” by practice, not by being born with the ability.) At first just practice, but with enough experience you will learn the scale of reactions, when people are just polite and when they are really happy… and then at some moment, when you get a happy reaction, you can ask whether it is okay to talk.
Sorry, the advice ends here—this is not a PUA forum, and some people don’t like this topic. I hope I made you interested, and perhaps provided a good starting map. Many specific answers and new ideas are in the books. As usual, use your brain. If something feels morally wrong or dangerous, don’t do it. But if something merely feels uncomfortable, expand your comfort zone; do it slowly, but do it. You can’t learn social skills by discussing them online. You have to practice. With practice, it will become easier. Don’t mention “PUA” to people, and feel free to ignore any bullshit. Just be aware that a lot of advice you get from traditional sources is also bullshit. Explore the territory, don’t just copy other people’s maps. Do it sooner rather than later, because then you will have more time to enjoy the gains.
This actually makes a lot of sense. “Only show attraction to girls outside of school/work, so that they are aware that you compartmentalize your life in such a way that they will not have to deal with the topic of romance with you at school/work if they are not inclined to do so.” This is why at a school dance it’s okay to go and rub your crotch on the butt of a girl you treat completely non-sexually during the day.
EDIT: And now the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace makes a lot more sense.
That’s fine, I understand that you probably have better things to do. Thank you for the advice/discussion, and good luck in your future endeavors. :)
That’s pretty much what I do instinctively, except that the compartments are more gerrymandered than that (and they’re not much clearer to my System 2 than (say) grammatical rules), and they depend on who the woman is (and, to a lesser extent, on what we’re talking about) but not much on where we are (e.g., with some people I’ll do the hover hand thing in pictures, with others I’m perfectly comfortable putting a hand on their thigh during class).
(This might be part of a same pattern as Feynman’s observation that it’s common for European physicists to talk about their work in bars but rare for American physicists.)
Actually, I think the lack of context makes it creepier.
Being that explicit so early in a conversation is usually considered impolite. (There’s no need to explicitly mention the bedroom—they’re on a dating site, she knows you mean that even if you just say you want to hang out.) Therefore, it demonstrates a lack of familiarity with politeness norms, and possibly with social interactions in general. In more usual contexts, it would instead demonstrate that you can afford flouting politeness rules without much of a status hit, but when you’re talking to someone who knows basically nothing about you other than what you’re communicating at the moment (for all she knows, you could be a sexual predator, a dork who basically never talks to women in meatspace, or even an uFAI), countersignalling is a bad idea.
Also, it pattern-matches a kind of guy who gets very resentful, sometimes in a scary way, when he doesn’t get his way. (And for some reason they seem to always be awful at writing—“your beautiful”, “knew to the area”...)
That just mean that you’re too sober. Drink more and try again.
But then the next morning you end up with even more shame to deal with. :(
Not necessarily—there are things I used to never do when sober because I assumed I would regret them, then I once did them when drunk, noticed that the (social) consequences weren’t anywhere near as negative as I had feared and were in fact quite positive, and now I often do them even when I’m sober.
Do they? Because saying “not all women are like that” has the implicature that some women are.
What do you care what the traditional roles in Western society are, so long as you’re both happy?
What fraction of the time do they succeed? (And when they do, how do you know that part of the reason why they had picked Susan rather than Jane in the first place was that on some level they already knew that they had less of a chance with the latter than with the former?)
Presumably if women rarely initiate and instead expect men to approach them, a man who frequently approaches women will be much more likely to find sex/a relationship than a man who just waits around for women to do the initiating.
I don’t know. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. But I am sure they succeed more than they would if, like me, they never tried.
That definitely is part of it.
OK, I thought you meant something like “I used to be in a relationship, but it had been initiated by the woman, which is untraditional; we were uncomfortable with that, and eventually we broke up as a result”, rather than “I used to be in a relationship, then for whatever reason we broke up, but I hadn’t been the one to initiate it so I don’t know how to initiate another one”; never mind. (I have heard a few women make the latter complaint before, though none of them mentioned the traditional roles.)
You must have been doing something right! I bet you’ll have great success if you follow Villiam’s advice.
Haha, I hope so.
How has this worked out for you?
Can you rephrase this question? I’m not sure what you’re asking.
Are you happy with the number and quality of relationships? Your dubiousness about not initiating seemed to be about it seeming weird rather than practical drawbacks.
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This is not an actual explanation of the asymmetry—why do men prefer to keep their preference mysterious less than women prefer to keep theirs mysterious? why do women have less of a disincentive to teach men’s preferences to their competitors than men do?
Which official story? People preferring (brutally simplifying while trying to stay polite) to marry older, richer people but to sleep with younger, sexier people isn’t that rare a trope as far as I can tell.
My impression is that there are many different shades with respect to this, ranging from ‘explicitly learning social skills which others may learn implicitly’ to ‘behaviour intended to trick, force, pressure, or otherwise outright manipulate girls into bed with you’ - with a great deal in between.
A man’s negative take on PUA.
A woman’s mostly negative take on PUA, though she thinks that a little PUA can be useful for men who are afraid to talk to women. Getting into the PUA sub-culture can leave men worse off.
Both have put a lot of thought into it.
My take is that PUA seems to be set in a universe where no one likes anyone else.
Funny thing is that I agree with the first article, I just have completely different connotations to that.
Yes, the stuff Mystery teaches really is dumbed down. Which is good, because some guys start so dumb that they need this; sometimes they have problems to understand even this. I was there once. And the stuff helped me to get out of there.
It feels to me like saying: “The elementary schools are so dumb, I learned much more at university!”—Sure, good for you! Also, well-played sir; you gently reminded us of your higher status. The competition among PUA bloggers is strong these days; many authors have to market themself as beyond-PUA to be able to sell their PUA products. (Nothing wrong about that, I would probably do the same thing if I weren’t too lazy to blog.)
I also agree with the rest of the article. If you take a mentally unstable person and teach them PUA, you will get a mentally unstable person with some PUA skills. And therefore… I mean, if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them Java programming, you will get a mentally unstable person with some Java skills. Perhaps it is socially unresponsible to teach mentally unstable people anything that increases their powers without fixing their problems first. But that is not a problem specific to PUA industry.
EDIT: Changed my mind about this.
Men helping low-status men to overcome their lack of social skills… is an evidence that no one likes anyone else? (Ten years ago, the help was provided online for free, only later it developed into a profitable industry.)
But they don’t focus on liking women, do they? Well, they often don’t. To make a fair comparison, how often do seduction (sorry, relationship) articles, magazines, and books for women talk about liking men, respecting their agency, et cetera?
And maybe the people criticizing PUAs just focus too much on the bad parts, and ignore the nicer parts. But I admit the bad parts may be majority of the stuff.
And if you take a mentally unstable person and teach them to use a weapon, you will get a mentally unstable person with some weapon-using skills. This may be more undesirable than a mentally unstable person with some Java skills.
On reading that again one month later… I indeed got that wrong. Edited to say it like a normal person.
Uhm, you are right about this; my mistake. I focused too much on winning the debate. Apologies to everyone.
I still think that the benefits of publishing PUA advice are probably higher than the costs, but it would be difficult to defend this claim. (We would need to get data: how many clueless frustrated guys finally got their relationships right; how many naive girls were pumped and dumped by mentally unstable guys with pickup skills; the further impact of both on the society; etc. And even then we would have to make a value judgement about how much we care about a damsel in distress versus an expendable low-status male.)
The first link said that PUA could leave people in worse shape than it found them—and Clarisse Thorn (second link) said the same.
Good point about PUA cultivating friendships between men. I’d missed that part. Still, it doesn’t do a good job of encouraging friendliness between romantic/sexual partners.
Compared with… relationship advice for women? (For example: don’t call him and rarely return his calls; stop dating him if he doesn’t buy you a romantic gift for your birthday or valentine’s day; don’t see him more than once or twice a week). How much of the PUA criticism—that it helps narcissist people develop their sense of grandiosity and become emotional vampires—applies to that, too? Perhaps the narcissism is more socially acceptable for women, because… uhm… yay, women! ?
Could we agree on a gender-neutral version that literature about “success” in relationships typically does not do a good job of encouraging friendliness between romantic/sexual partners? (And of course, there are always a few exceptions.)
(Or perhaps even more generally that literature about maximizing X does not do a good job at maximizing Y?)
That’s a reasonable question. However, I have no idea to what extent women take The Rules seriously, while there’s a lot of evidence that some fraction of the men here take PUA very seriously.
How about avoiding labels completely, and asking directly about behavior? Let’s make gender-neutral or gender-reversed questions for men and women, taboo all jargon, and see how many of them will report using the given strategy.
For example: “Do you sometimes pretend to be unavailable, even if you have free time, just to make yourself more scarce?” Or: “If the person you are dating becomes too proud of themselves, do you slightly criticize them in order to bring them back to earth?”
A woman can learn gender-reversed versions of some PUA advice from a magazine or hear it from her friends; she does not have to identify with any label. And she does not have to read any specific book, because all the information is already out there. Advice for women about manipulating men is generally not shocking and controversial. “The Rules” is a book that strongly pattern-matches PUA advice (a name similar to “The Game”, simplistic bullet-point advice), which was probably intentional, to create controversy and increase sales… but it’s not like women never read the specific ideas before in other books and magazines. (Okay, this one is probably new: “Don’t Discuss The Rules with Your Therapist”.)
Thank you for the links! I will most likely read the first link at some point, and maybe the second one eventually.
(From the about page of the blog linked to:)
WOW, I have been looking for a website like this for a few months now. Again, thank you!
Me too.
I don’t think the overlap between club-type dancing and the type of dancing that one takes lessons to learn is very large, though.
I don’t have much experience with club dancing, but at the few occasions, I was there with a girl who I previously danced ballroom-style with, and we mostly danced jive or quickstep or cha-cha, just with shorter steps to take less space and not move across the room. We had fun, and the feedback from other people was positive.
But even with the club-type dancing, somehow it got much easier for me once I became good at ballroom dances. Maybe I got more confident, maybe I learned to follow the rhythm, maybe I started to understand some movement patterns; probably all of that together.
Yeah, this is what I’m thinking.
A big problem I have with club dancing is that I am 6′6″, and I feel (probably at least somewhat accurately) that I am unusually visible and that any move I do is being judged by at least a few people. So I end up just standing there, then immediately realizing “this is much more awkward than dancing really poorly is”, then concluding “Oh my god, no matter what I do I am doomed, I have to get out of here right now”, then leaving, then sitting alone feeling like there is something very flawed about me.
I will get over this someday by applying a dedicated effort, but right now there are more important self-improvement projects. Until then I just will stay far away from any dance where I can’t get drunk beforehand.
Well, I agree that it needn’t be at the top of your to-do list. In fact, I’m not sure you need worry about getting over it at all, really. Not enjoying hanging out/dancing in clubs is no serious character defect, and plenty of people share your preference. By the way, happy birthday (or was that yesterday?)
club dancing is basically doing whatever you feel like to the beat. This is a lot easier if you have a repertoire of moves from other styles of dance or activity that you can instantiate. Also what Villiam_Bur said.