That’s a low blow. There’s a big difference in needing help with your confidence or help in dealing with social awkwardness/anxiety (which in turn can make you more interesting to potential partners) and using psychological mind games to try to con your mark into sleeping with you.
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Are there situations in which “PUA” advice could actually be helpful?
No.
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First a disclainer: I am too old to pick up women on the streets. I think women have a legitimate concern with street pick up. I am not trying to defend one side over the other. I am just interested in seeing people better articulate their differences so that they can be understood.
I was not the first to bring up Dale Canergie to this thread. I don’t think comparing Dale Caernegie with PU theories is a low blow. Dale Carnegie was a salesman above all things and his mos famous book is about influencing people. I have read the book, admitedly some time ago, and found it to be essentially about tricking people to like you so that you could get them to part with their money and buy what you had to offer.
Therefore, I see a parallel between:
- a method teaching people with poor social skills to trick people into becoming their friends so that they part with their money and
- a method teaching people with poor social skills to trick women into becoming their friends so that they offer a night of sex.
I may be wrong and not remember the book perfectly, however.
This being said, can you please explain why you think my argument was a low blow and what, in your mind, the essential differences between self-help and PUA methods?
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Methods like Dale Carnegie, Crucial Conversations, and others are about how to build better interpersonal relationships. Relationships, be it in business or personal aren’t about some nebulous Trumpian concept of “winning” (no matter the cost). They are about quid pro quo, mutual benefit, and mutual success.
PUAs are the completely opposite of this. The only goal is “victory” at any cost. Building relationships? Relationship isn’t in the PUA vocabulary. As far as a PUA is concerned, if some dumb bitch gets her feelings hurt, she had it coming. It’s a zero sum game: get laid, or you’re nothing more than a beta cuck.
Influence doesn’t need to be a bad word, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with influencing others to get what you want. The difference is PUAs weaponize influence to prey on others weaknesses.
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What you want, including sex? 
I am sorry, but let just say that I remember Dale Carnegie’s book to be different to what you present here.
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I considered myself fairly successful in the subject area in my youth, but I never tried to “pick up women on the streets.”
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The advice ‘be yourself’ is all you need… provided you also heed the secret second part of the advice, viz. “while being someone who is attractive to your chosen gender(s).” If you don’t heed the second part, then there’s no advice that can help you. And that’s not something you can synthesize, either, as attempt to graft attractiveness onto yourself will come of as creepy, no matter how you do it. The trick is to achieve attractiveness, for which there is remarkably little advice and remarkably little you can do.
So, no, PUA advice is not useful, not just because they are awful, awful people (though they are, in spades) but because if your goal is for someone to want to be in a relationship with you, what they are peddling won’t help at all. It’s for tricking people into short-term sexual contact. No more. It’s pretty good at doing that, sadly, so if that and only that is your goal then… seek help?
But if you are not a sociopath and for the sake of argument, you’ve had consistently rotten romantic luck, there’s no advice whatsoever I am aware of that helps you. Because the mistake you are making is being you. (Disclaimer: Rhetorical ‘you’ used throughout, not intended to be about anyone in particular.)
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