Yet we usually don’t join toxic communities, blame everyone else for our failures or go on killing sprees because we’re not getting all the ‘Perfect 10’ dick we are “entitled to.”
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Especially if they can sense that the other party a) won’t listen or b) might even weaponise those admissions against them?
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Pickup Artists aren’t about improving oneself and how to better treat women/men of the opposite sex. It is about using psychological manipulation, leveraging their negative self image or insecurities, or using other tricks to manipulate someone who wouldn’t otherwise sleep with you into sleeping with you. it is gross and predatory and rapey. objectification for the sake of fucking. even the idea that you can be an “artist” at manipulating other people for this purpose is maximum creeper. It is about the most scores with the most objects.
these are NOT groups of people looking to better themselves to find healthy equal relationships or pairings. if you have to put “court” in quotes…
this. well said. they are not objects or conquests that need an artist to score on. yuck. 
PUA is a gross dysfunctional man child fantasy that needs to be stomped out as unhealthy BS.
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Well stated.
Like I said about ‘the other side of the coin’, incels, back in September:
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Um, no. It’s not similar at all. And “fast seduction” sure doesn’t sound like something that takes the other party’s humanity into account. If you and the other person are DTF, then that’s cool - but to use the words “fast seduction” in of itself implies mind games to basically trick the other person sleep with you rather than it being a mutual thing.
But clearly you’re choosing to be either willfully ignorant of what folks (women, especially) here are trying to say, or just trying to keep stirring the pot. It’s exhausting to me so I bid you good day.
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The discussion in that topic is depressingly familiar to this one. Bold assumptions about women not being as sexual as men and strong contentions about sexism being a “natural” part of certain cultures, followed by wide-eyed claims of “misunderstandings” due to linguistic differences. Plus ça change…
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They’re opposites sides of the same coin.
Most pick-up artist ploys will fail, because they operate on the basic premise that all women are all the same two-dimensional objects, instead of actual human beings with their own emotions and agency. When that inevitable failure happens, the negative feelings harbored by the would-be PUA’s turn inward, and they start to downward spiral, often becoming resentful incels and MRAs.
And the people who bend over backwards in defense of such toxic ideologies will likely never see the light, because they have a personal or vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
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You must be very, very old. I did not find that to be the case when I was living there nearly 40 years ago.
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This snippet seems to be present in pretty much every discriminatory ideology: Group X is superior and somehow, despite that superiority, it is being denied something it deserves by inferior group Y. Then you blink a few times and ask how it is, in their view, the inferior group got to be in charge, and next thing you know you’re hip deep in a global conspiracy theory.
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Alternately, maybe he just didn’t bother reading the comic he’s been expressing such strong views about.
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i’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site that when i was in my early 20s i began to develop resentments because it seemed to me that women were rejecting a nice guy like myself to be with assholes. i’m afraid that if there had been an incel community for me to have fallen into that things might have worked out poorly but instead i began to observe things more closely and i noticed that the assholes the women were choosing were also interesting to be around, that they had experiences and stories that were cool to hear, and that they had a certain amount of charisma and confidence. i had multiple interests and experiences along with a way with words that even then approached eloquence and so i began relating anecdotes of interest from my experiences and developed a signature style of expression all while righteously maintaining my niceness. it made an enormous difference in the way other people, both male and female, responded to me.
after that self-assessment and self-improvement i had no major problems with dating and remained a nice guy. in a way it was fun to be both charismatic and nice to be with. at this point i’ve been married for nearly 21 years which i doubt would have ever happened if i had continued to stew in my own anger.
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A lot of the Manosphere guys don’t seem to know how to treat people like people, in general.
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Possibly, we were not in the same region of France. I lived in the countryside where people may have been more traditional. Also possibly, people reacted differently to you because you were a foreigner.
I read the comic and I specifically remember about the alt.seduction.fast usenet newsgroup, which quickly moved to its own website when usenet collapsed under spam. I also remember Mystery, the guy with a hat in the comic (weird guy with obvious insecurities) and others of the time: maniachigh (lived in Japan), David de Angelo (good writer, but shaddy businessman), gunwitch (a rare example of a guy who was not a nerd), etc…
I said from the outset that I was active on these groups at the time and on a related French site. If what I did over 15 years ago makes me a
“skeevy PUA prick” till the end of time, so be it.
What I am trying to offer here to supplement the discussion is an account about these groups as they were 15 years ago. I am not trying to justify their existence and I am certainly not trying to excuse the manosphere or, God forbid, the “incel” movement. I agreed from the onset that what we have today is deeply wrong.
I am also saying that it is not clear to me, as an early insider who left the websites 15 years ago, how the evolution happened. When I left, there was no obvious sense of “entitlement”, no talks about “feminism” and the men, in average, were reasonably successful. Somewhere in between, the attitudes flipped.
My feelings is that it is a combination of several factors:
- the people who were offering the course for money had seedy business ethics and their businesses collapsed. I know that for a fact in France. Maybe the alt-right offered them money.
- night clubs became more noisy and a large part of the seduction techniques revolved around talking, telling silly stories, etc… so the techniques became less useful
- dating happened more and more via websites and apps, which were a death blow to the students. The typical student would have social anxiety. Being forced to go out at night and actually talk to women was a major factor in curing that social anxiety. Once he would imagine that he could date from behind his computer, the game was over.
A last word on the subject. I am not trying to justify or excuse what I did 15 years ago, because I feel here is neither the time nor the place. I am just trying to give an account of times past, for everybody’s information. So: yes, I willfully ignore these messages, because they are not on topic. The topic is not to demonstrate how bad a person I may have been at the time. As I said, if people here believe I was a “skeevy PUA prick”, so be it. I remember it differently, but it was 15 years ago.
It was called fast seduction, because of the time constraint of a night club. The idea was to go to a night club, find members of the opposite sex who were, as you wrote, “DTF”. Then, talk about silly things so that they would have a great time. Eventually, they would figure out that the great time they had at the night club could be extended later in the night.
Where? All I’ve seen in this topic is you talking about your nerdy “friends” using fast seduction techniques and citing your certainty about “their” success stories.
Really, man? “Asking for a friend.”
Could it be, just maybe, that this kind of patriarchal traditionalism historically has an affinity with right-wing political movements?
I remember a lot of them, too. For example, this guy:
Oh, what a surprise, he’s gone neo-Nazi! So puzzling, another manosphere denizen gone alt-right.
I remember some of these PUA types from the early oughts, and I also remember immediately concluding based on their own words that all of them, including Ross Jeffries, were sleazeball charlatans.
I don’t think you’re a PUA anymore, but it’s clear that you’re not interested in hearing (again) that the entire movement, including the proto-PUA “fast seduction” movement, was and continues to be inherently sexist, even if you (sorry, your “friends”) were too much of a blinkered and self-pitying nerd to see it yourself.
You can rationalise it as thinking it was simply an efficient way to “target” women and continue to willfully ignore people pointing out that the dark aspects and crappy attitude toward women were there all along, but that doesn’t change the reality. It also doesn’t change the fact that there’s an affinity between right-wing politics and the manosphere.
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I did not know James Sears, I vaguely remember a guy called Dimitri, but I am not so sure. Anyway, what I see in your wikipedia article is that he blew up 35 millions $ to get 254 votes. Frankly, I would like more guys like him, alt-right parties would become bankrupt in no time.
About your personal attacks, I’ll simply ignore them. The thread runs out in a few hours anyway.
Ignoring the opinions of others seems to be what you do in these topics about relationships between men and women. For example, your dismissal of @chgoliz’s own experience.
And no personal attacks here, but descriptions of behaviour. I’m pointing out that you were pretending you were talking about your friends when (twist ending!) you were talking about yourself all along.
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I think what others are trying to tell you is that if you didn’t see the inherent sexism in the messages then that was because you missed it. I said above that I indirectly used information from a PUA newsletter more than a decade ago, and I can see why you’d feel that there were people who got something out of it (e.g., being pressured to overcoming anxiety).
It was still based around a lot of men-are-like-this/women-are-like-this stuff. I can see why that wouldn’t leap off the page as sexist to some people; Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus was apparently the #1 selling book of the 1990s, written by a guy with a PhD. A lot of people see messages like that as practical, not as sexist.
But it was always sexist no matter how people read it. A major book that is read by men and women and discussed in mainstream media is reflected and reinforced existing culture. An insular movement in online chat rooms that is lead by charlatans intensified into a toxic morass.
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You sure it has nothing to do with you seeing the world around you through a male lens?
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