If more geeks could come across as "exciting badboys, or masculine and high socially-skilled" then women who are subconsciously attracted to that type could actually wind up with someone intelligent and decent, instead of the usual jerks. You're raising the average quality level of the socially successful man.
That's exactly what I was trying to get at.
You can get better at attracting women, and that's great, but women are free to reject you.
Aside from hyperbolic marketing materials, what would make us think that PUAs believe that they are "guaranteed" success with women? What makes us think that they resist the notion that women are free to reject them?
Actually, by joining the seduction community, PUAs demonstrate a recognition that success with women is not guaranteed, and that they will only achieve it with a lot of work figuring out how to satisfy women's criteria.
PUAs call getting obsessed about any one particular woman "one-itis," which is one of the cardinal sins of pickup.
To understand the attitude that PUAs have towards rejection and towards the validity of women's preferences, let's take a look, not at the words of PUAs, but at the words of a man criticizing PUAs:
The seduction community has two major flaws: The first flaw is that it teaches you the very contradictory message that you have to learn to be masculine and be your own man while catering to women and their actions. So no matter what she does, it's up to you to calibrate it for best effect. If she wants cocky and funny you better be cocky and funny. If she wants an asshole you better be that too. If she wants entertainment and you aren't entertaining then she will move on to the next guy who is.
The second flaw is that the seduction community never or rarely addresses those things that women are doing wrong. It's like a child who throws a tantrum and instead of disciplining him or her you take the position that you have to find out what it is they want and give it to them. There's this intense fear that if you call out women on their misbehaviour you are a chump or weak or unable to take it like a man. So rather than do that many guys prefer to just take the "spoil the child" approach to getting laid. Game is basically a coping strategy for women's rotten behaviour. If a woman has attitude and is unresponsive god forbid you tell her to open up. It's your job to figure out what buttons to push.
[...]
• A woman can't take responsibility for her actions and flakes on you — The PUA interpretation: You didn't do enough to attract her.
• A woman is with friends who regularly cockblock — The PUA interpretation: You have to win the friends over (never mind what she thinks). So learn group theory.
• A woman loses interest soon after talking to you — The PUA interpretation: You didn't stimulate her enough.
Basically, this writer recognizes and bashes PUAs for having an attitude towards women that "the customer is always right." Whenever you get rejected, you go back to the drawing board and try to figure out what you could have done differently. This attitude can be grueling on oneself... but it wins.
There are a few particular tactics in the seduction community that I do worry about pressuring women sexually. PUAs will sometimes persist through some forms of ambiguous resistance, or "token" resistance. For example, if a woman and a PUA are making out, and she says "we should stop soon" while continuing to vigorously make out, then the PUA will probably keep going until he gets a less ambiguous rejection. Similarly, if a woman says "we shouldn't do this" and then starts unbuttoning his shirt, the PUA will listen to her hands, not her words. If a woman does give an obvious "no," then the PUA might try initiating the same activity later if he has reason to believe she may have changed her mind.
I'm not quite sold on some of the ways that PUAs initiate with women who are conflicted about sex, yet even in these cases, PUAs will keep going not because they feel "entitled," but because they believe that the women involved will want them to keep going.
Just like everywhere else, PUAs are trying to fulfill what they perceive as the majority preferences of women, which may end marginalizing women with less-typical preferences. Unfortunately, it's a society-wide problem that many mainstream straight women seem to have trouble engaging in explicit verbal communication about sexuality and consent, which creates an incentive on men to make guesses, guesses which are sometimes wrong. More on that here.
While the attitude towards consent in the seduction community does leave some things to be desired, I don't think it's actually very far from the attitudes toward consent in the general culture, held by both men and women. It's another case where we bash the seduction community for merely verbalizing and copying what everyone else is already doing.
The rationality of negotiation over consent would be a great subject for discussion sometime.
For the most part, PUAs believe that they are fulfilling women's preferences, even though their measurement of women's preferences may sometimes be incorrect or biased (such as when assessing women who are experiencing conflict over their preferences). For the most part, PUAs butt out when they believe they have received an unambiguous rejection, and then try to examine where they "messed up."
• A woman is with friends who regularly cockblock — The PUA interpretation: You have to win the friends over (never mind what she thinks). So learn group theory.
I thought about the mathematical sense of “group theory” first. I clearly need a break. (Well, I am taking one right now.)
Overview: This is a proposal for a LessWrong Pick Up Artist (PUA)-like sub-community; PUA without the PU (get it?)1. Members would focus on the deliberate practice of social artistry, but with non-mating goals. Origins and intent of the goal are discussed, possible topics for learning are listed, and suggestions for next steps are solicited.
Origins:
The PUA Community began decades ago with men that wanted to learn how to get better at seducing women. As I understand it, they simply began posting their (initially) awkward attempts at love online. Over the years, they appear to have amassed a fairly impressive set of practical knowledge and skills in this domain.
I admire and applaud this effort. However, my ability to meet women is not currently a limiting factor in my life satisfaction. In reading some of the PUA literature, I was struck how often different authors remarked on the unintended side benefits of their training: better relationships at work, better interviewing skills, more effective negotiations, more non-pickup social fun, better male friendships, more confidence, etc. These guys were able to make major strides in areas that I've struggled to improve at all in... without even bloody intending to! This struck me as an something worth taking very seriously!
I find it alarming that such a valuable resource would be monopolized in pursuit of orgasm; it's rather as if a planet were to burn up its hydrocarbons instead of using them to make useful polymers. PUA ought to be a special case of a more general skill set, and it's being wasted. I say that my goals are noble, and as such I should have the opportunity to sharpen my skills to at least the keenness of a PUA master!
Statement of Purpose:
The purpose of this post is to open discussion on how to construct a community of developing social artisans, modeled after the useful components2 of the PUA community. If there is sufficient mass, the next goals are probably sussing out learning methods and logistics.
The mission of the hypothetical community will probably need to be fleshed out more explicitly (and I don't want to be too prescriptive), but pretty much what I was thinking was expressed well by Scott Adams:
Word! [EDIT: We need not be bound by this exact list. For instance, there is no way I'm going to be doing any golfing.]
I've met people who were shockingly, seemingly preternaturally adept in social settings. Of course this is not magic. Like anything else, it can be reduced to a set of constituent steps and learned. We just need to figure out how.
Next steps:
I have a rather long list of ideas ready to go, but they made this post kind of awkward. Plus, Scott Adam's post says much of what I was trying to get at. Let's just start the conversation.
So, what do you think?
1 I have nothing whatsoever against the majority of the PUAers with whom I've had encounters, and the title is just meant to be funny. No offense!
2 The mention of PUA drags along several associations that I want to disavow (think anything obviously "Dark Arts"). I considered omitting the fact that much of the intellectual heritage of this idea is the PUAers to avoid these associations, but I couldn't think of another way to tie it together. This idea owes its genesis to the PUA community, but the product is not intended to be its exact replica. Undesirable elements need not be ported from the old system to the new.