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:
This is a proposal for a LessWrong Pick Up Artist (PUA)-like sub-community; PUA without the PU (get it?). Members would focus on the deliberate practice of social artistry, but with non-mating goals.
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.
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.
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":
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.
The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
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.
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’ve theorized that maybe feminists should provide good pickup advice
I'm trying to imagine such a guide:
There isn't such an overwhelming conflict of interest with regards to agenda (which is not to say that the political agenda wouldn't interfere even with advice to females at times as well).
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:
...(1) A week or so ago I was sitting in a bar with a few friends and a guy walked up to me and said “You have lovely eyes, they’d be remarkable if you wore makeup.” That’s a neg. That made me laugh at him and tel
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.
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.