Clarisse Thorn recently posted a useful article about Ethical Pick-Up Artistry, bringing up a few basic critiques of traditional PUA and suggesting a few alternatives.
Here’s the thing: the current pickup artist subculture has a monopoly on effective advice for how to break down social interactions and talk to women. Not all of it works, but enough of it works that it draws guys in. As a pickup artist instructor once told me, “When I first found the community I was horrified by how sleazy and gross it is, but I had never had a girlfriend and I told myself: dude, if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna die alone.”
I’ve theorized that maybe feminists should provide good pickup advice, in an attempt to counterbalance some of the awfulness of the existing community. In the meantime, however, I figure the next best thing to do is to provide a list of less-misogynistic pickup artist instructors and sites, and a few very basic critiques.
A proposal to formalize this Not the same thing, but a discussion on forming a community to practice social artistry in general has been brought up on LW before, but I'm not personally aware of anything coming out of that.
The counterpart question is, "Because men approach and women choose, women have a tremendous amount of power over how men act, and over what relationships can exist. How can women use this power ethically?"
At the risk of becoming annoying, THAT IS NOT WHAT I PROPOSED:
Seriously, this is the first line of the article. The title includes "Without the PU". I don't see how I could have been clearer.
The difficulty I've had in getting this point across is a big (but not the only) reason why I've been hesitant to develop this idea further.
To reiterate:
PUA's got really good at a specific type social interaction - picking up women.
There are many types of social interaction that it would be beneficial to be really good at.
Therefore, we ought to see if there are any aspects of how the PUA's went about getting good at achieving their specific goal that could be adopted to general social goals.
I think that Ethical Pick Up Artistry is a good idea (I've stated publicly that I'm a fan of PUA except for the misogyny, which is real and appalling), but is not at all the same as my idea.
That joke is exactly what destroyed the clarity. You set up an alternative reading and it stuck.
How are feminists supposed to generate good pickup advice? If typical female advice to males actually worked, the PUA community wouldn't need to spend so much effort figuring out the right approaches. Any woman who wants to generate useful dating advice for men needs to first recognize that the default advice that comes to her mind has a counterintuitively poor track record, so her only chance of success is to try something weird.
Possibly relevant quote from Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages":
Nothing says that PUA people HAVEN'T generated perfectly good advice. The point is not to independently generate advice that works, or to claim credit for advice someone else came up with. The point is to try to filter that advice into something we can point shy guys to and say "this will help you, without being unethical."
You're also missing that men can be feminists. Producing a quality system of PUA that is ethical and effective will require the efforts of both men and women.
Yeah, this is definitely what feminists should work on. Rather than giving unsuccessful men a long extension to their current list of "don'ts", they could give effective advice so that the dating pool will contain a higher fraction of men who actually bother to think about feminist concerns in the first place.
I followed one of the links mentioned in the article, and it is pretty good stuff.
Athol Kay's blog MarriedManSexLife is along these lines. It applies PUA-like insights to long term relationships (this is not the only thing he talks about, but it is a major part). These are more likely to be ethical because in order to work they have to work repeatedly on the same person.
I'm trying to imagine such a guide:
You would think that if feminism was about watching out for women's interests, it would also watch out for their heterosexual interests. Yet some feminists seem to view women's heterosexual interests as counter their political interests, when those women have preferences for traditional gender dynamics.
In some conversations with feminists about pickup techniques, I often get the sense that they look down on the women who respond to particular techniques. For example, in a thread at Feministe, "negs" are only granted effectiveness because of vulnerabilities in women. It couldn't possibly be because some types of women actually enjoy some types of negs, without being psychologically broken!
For example, this comment supposedly distinguishes a "neg" from light teasing:
... (read more)I am impressed at the quality of the comments in that thread.
If I were a mean person, I'd downvote this for linking to a long, probably interesting discussion when there are things I need to get done.