Disclaimer: this comment may be affected by a higher-than-usual level of cognitive biases. Take it with a grain of salt.
There is a lot of truth to that, but isn’t it also manipulation for women to wear make-up, high heels, fake breasts, painted hair, plastic surgery? Yet I seldom see the latter criticized. It is simply accepted, even encouraged.
See also this about how men in modern western societies generally spend much less effort than women on being attractive. To the extent that a world full of attractive people is better than a world full of unattractive people, that’s essentially women cooperating and men defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma. When one takes into account the fact that attractiveness in men doesn’t depend just on appearance but also on behaviour, then the general idea behind PUA (but not necessarily any specific implementation of it) looks to me a lot like men starting to cooperate as well.
If you regard only women, or only men, the cooperate-defect criteria switches; if no woman wears makeup, the one who does gets an advantage over the others. In terms of relative advantage, these behaviors are defection.
I’d suggest this is a more natural perspective, since the group perspective requires unified decision-making. An individual male or female isn’t making a decision “for men” or “for women.”
Disclaimer: this comment may be affected by a higher-than-usual level of cognitive biases. Take it with a grain of salt.
See also this about how men in modern western societies generally spend much less effort than women on being attractive. To the extent that a world full of attractive people is better than a world full of unattractive people, that’s essentially women cooperating and men defecting in a prisoner’s dilemma. When one takes into account the fact that attractiveness in men doesn’t depend just on appearance but also on behaviour, then the general idea behind PUA (but not necessarily any specific implementation of it) looks to me a lot like men starting to cooperate as well.
If you regard only women, or only men, the cooperate-defect criteria switches; if no woman wears makeup, the one who does gets an advantage over the others. In terms of relative advantage, these behaviors are defection.
I’d suggest this is a more natural perspective, since the group perspective requires unified decision-making. An individual male or female isn’t making a decision “for men” or “for women.”
Indeed, I used to suspect that opposition to PUA by men was due to essentially a (possibly implicit) cartel.
Except insofar as if a woman wears makeup, other women will wear makeup too to keep up.