[guest post] Detrimental Attitudes of the Pickup Artist Community

647 Responses to “[guest post] Detrimental Attitudes of the Pickup Artist Community”

1. 

   Sagredo April 19, 2011 at 12:00 am #

   Excellent, excellent piece and absolutely spot on. This is the criticism I’ve been waiting for.

   One of the annoying things about the ignorant complaints from Marcotte and various folks on Feministe etc. is that they mask some of the real issues with the seduction community. And on the other side there’s Roissy et alii, who blow away a lot of the egalitarian nonsense but are flawed by a deep distrust of women.
2. 

   Sam April 19, 2011 at 12:53 am #

   My thoughts reading this revolved mostly around how more “ethical game” doesn’t really cut it… It’s seems to be really more about “better game”, or “game 2.0″, and “more ethical” (more aware of ethical elements) seems like a natural ingredient thereof, not merely a limiting condition.
3. 

   Scootah April 19, 2011 at 1:10 am #

   Healthy game even? I think most of my critticisms of PUA behaviour revolve around the fact that so many PUA’s have an incredibly blinkered view of women. PUA’s seem to see women, and guys who aren’t part of the scene – as inherently less than themselves. And while seeing all other guys as AFC’s is unhealthy – it’s the blindness to women as humanbeings that’s really really unhealthy.

   Natural game is much less social robotish and creepy as a spectator. It removes my largest practical critticism of PUA’s. The situation from ‘The Game’ where every girl in LA had already seen the magic trick, and none of the ‘players’ could apply enough creativity to try a different magic trick, or enough insight to find some other play that does the same thing as the magic trick stands out as a highlight of the flaws in unnatural/precanned routines. The Natural game thing is much less creepy – but it still tends to include a lot of dehumanization, where women are replacable within their respective hotness bracket, like NPC’s in a video game that will respawn so you can try again later.
4. 

   Floreat Magdalena April 19, 2011 at 3:13 am #

   I recognise all of these aspects of the Community, especially the idea of swapping one set of flawed notions of women for another.

   I will say though that some of the negative stuff about women isn’t far off the truth. Men and women are not angels in dating. The main flaw in PUA thinking about gender relations is that PUAs see themselves as sort of outside the norms which govern regular behaviour, like they can see the lines of code in the matrix of social interaction. This is simply not the case most of the time, and PUAs will act just as insecurely and irrationally as the women who provide the list of traits above.

   Lastly – feminists can deny shit-testing all they want, but it definitely exists.
5. 

   Clarisse April 19, 2011 at 4:21 am #

   @Sagredo — One of the annoying things about the ignorant complaints from Marcotte and various folks on Feministe etc. is that they mask some of the real issues with the seduction community.

   I think a lot of feminist criticism of the community is legit. But I agree that some of it is not. The idea that a lot of it is just masking real community issues is especially interesting.

   @Floreat — Lastly – feminists can deny shit-testing all they want, but it definitely exists.

   Can we please avoid snark against “feminists” as a group? This is a feminist blog. At least attempt to be polite about feminism.

   My main problem with the shit test concept at this point is that there’s so little acknowledgment that while some so-called shit tests are women trying to flirt, a lot of them are women trying to honestly communicate. I’ve hung out with PUAs who refused to believe that I was being honest when I told them I wouldn’t have sex with them. It’s incredibly annoying, and I can only imagine how insanity-inducing it would be to actually be in a relationship with those guys. At some point you have to be able to talk about things honestly and not just label all pushback as a shit test to be ignored/reframed.
6. 

   Floreat Magdalena April 19, 2011 at 5:04 am #

   I consider myself a feminist. When I talk about feminists I don’t mean every feminist ever… (But I take your point, and people do tend to be very literal minded!)

   Frankly, I don’t tend to think of women’s behaviour in PUA terms, because I was able to employ pick-up techniques to raise my confidence levels with women and comfort in my own sexuality to the extent that I don’t need it as a conscious paradigm.

   Frankly, if you’re strong-willed, independent and confident, you’ll “pass” shit tests irrespective of whether you recognise them as such. Incompetent men who have read PUA material tend to see shit tests in everything women do, which as you note is not a realistic view of how women behave. But shit tests do exist and they aren’t necessarily flirting. For example, they will happen a lot in relationships.
7. 

   Tomek Kulesza April 19, 2011 at 6:23 am #

   Well, my (apart from the other stuff like misogyny and plan stupidity of generalizations and simply bad advice about happiness in life) gripe with it is that ‘the game’ is basically a traditional fifties guide “how to be good wife and mother”. How to succed in your traditional gender role. Which this posts also talks about.

   What do i mean? That it creates a script to follow regardless of your actual desires. Don’t want to be PUA? You’re loser. Don’t want a husband and children? You’re sad old spinster.

   Really, what men really needed are more judging of their worth based on their “success” with women. Good laugh.
8. 

   Tomek Kulesza April 19, 2011 at 6:31 am #

   At least women had hugely successful feminist movement to deconstruct their oppressive norms. What men need is more folks like Thomas Millar, not guys who knew nothing but your typical geek social life full of mutual competition for hierarchy (whatever it is based on) fight and malice and then apply it to gender relations.
9. 

   Guestina April 19, 2011 at 10:10 am #

   This looks like a pretty interesting post. I just had time to glance over it, but I take issue to the “if a guy gets a girlfriend it means he’s settling” part. I’ve never seen that belief in the advice I’ve read. Trying to get any girlfriend is settling. I started my education by reading David D’ and there have been four or five other people in the PUA and Seduction Community that I’ve followed less closely. Maybe I subconsciously filtered out the most sexist advice early on. Fascinating.
10. 

    Clarisse April 20, 2011 at 4:08 am #

    @Floreat — sorry, I’m oversensitive. Getting shit tested by a lot of anti-feminists lately ;)

    @Sam — I’ve been thinking about your point on ethics not being a limiting condition. I think that’s really key — generally a good point about ethics in general. I feel like ethics is so often seen as “this is limiting me, this is making me feel bad” — when at its best, ethics should be workable as a positive and increasing-options kind of thing. Sometimes being ethical is hard, sure, but ultimately it’s about making things better for everyone, right? Treating partners in an ethical way will often offer positives beyond internal warm fuzzies — from their increased self-esteem, for example ….
11. 

    Lucky 72 April 20, 2011 at 9:26 am #

    The article is very good, and certainly highlights some of the things that seems off putting about the whole PUA scene (he forgot the abbreviations and acronyms – it reminds me of the Army, and not in a good way).

    But it doesn’t really help with what we AFC’s are supposed to do about our shortfalls (apart from improving our personal hygiene and stop jacking off to Megan Fox – which seems to be the latest annoying feminist myths about nice guys’ lack of success).

    And perhaps any attempt at creating ethical pickup tips, should include some tips for women on how to behave and how not to behave, as well?

    I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say, that at least some of the PUA advice is based on real experiences with some women. And that if women, overall, was more conscious of how some of their behaviour hurts men, combined with some useful advice for ‘nice guys who refuse the current PUA scene’, we would have come a little way in solving the puzzle.

    While ‘geeting guys to buy women drinks’ has been flogged to death on the Ethical Pick Up comments, I can easily name a few other hurtful behaviours men encounter in the dating scene, like needless teasing, harsh rejections or not even not acknowledging your existence.

    Teasing and rejections is all part of the game, but some women has turned it into an artform to mindfuck men. I find buying women drinks heaven, compared to some of the shit I’ve had hurled at me (and, yes obviously it’s because I’ve deficient hygiene and jerks off to Megan Fox, doh!).

    So while it’s reasonable to criticize the PUA’s, we should not forget to criticize the way the whole dating scene is set up – and the patriarchy is not the only -archy that has its hands pretty dirty on that account.

    Thanks to you Clarisse for the empathy to acknowledge the plight of the ‘nice guys’ and to try to offer a better alternative than the PUA’s.

    L

    P.S.
    I think feminists should spend some time coming up with useful subgroups (like the mid-90′s heavy scene, where it seemed all bands were their own subgroup. That led to a lot of Spinal Tappy moments in interviews.)

    Because sometimes some of us men need to vent in a nonspecific, generalizing way against what we see as female encroachment on our territory (sometimes you girls scare the bejeezus out of our masculinity), and it seems ‘feminist’ and /or ‘feminism’ is all we can think of. Is it Ok to refer to y’all as the Vulvacracy?
12. 

    Sagredo April 20, 2011 at 12:18 pm #

    I can easily name a few other hurtful behaviours men encounter in the dating scene, like needless teasing, harsh rejections or not even not acknowledging your existence.

    From a feminist point of view, interfering with women’s ability to reject men in the name of ethics is going to be a non-starter.

    And actually, PUA is, well, game about women behaving this way and doesn’t criticise them for it or complain about it. It’s perfectly reasonable for women to screen out undesirable men, so PUA seeks to teach ways of becoming more desirable. Here’s Kezia on “bitch shields”.

    If I remember correctly, standard PUA advice to guys tired of all that is “switch to day game”.
13. 

    Tomek Kulesza April 20, 2011 at 1:02 pm #

    Wow, what a terrible thing (your Kezia link). To paraphrase her (sentence from ‘nice guys’ video), if i would have to go out and participate in such activity, i’d sooner kill myself :p

    Am i missing something? What’s the point of going to places which revolve around mutual teasing and generally nasty attitude towards other humans?

    (what’s day game, btw?)
14. 

    Clarisse April 20, 2011 at 1:39 pm #

    Day game is trying to pick women up during the day (at bookstores, coffeeshops, laundromats, on the bus, wherever). Women during the day are indeed less likely to display so-called “bitch shields”, although not totally unlikely.

    I have a working theory that men who are into PUA are (a) into making sure that they can get ANY woman (as Kezia encourages) and (b) actually more attracted to women who have bitch shields, give shit tests, etc. For them, a large amount of their attraction to the game is sense of accomplishment.

    Women should not be pressured not to reject men. We have to be able to set boundaries. (So does everyone else.)

    I’m okay with encouraging women not to be assholes about rejecting, but feminists don’t actually have a lot of control over the behavior of a lot of women. In fact, we don’t actually have control over anyone’s behavior. If we want to encourage women to be less assholish, then it’ll have to go the same way as encouraging PUAs to be less assholish — try to explain men’s perspective and offer effective tactics for interacting with men. SucceedSocially.com, which I linked in the above post, has a section called “The Minds of Shy Guys” that I think has probably accomplished a lot more on this score than all the rantings of anti-feminist assholes put together.
15. 

    Sagredo April 20, 2011 at 3:52 pm #

    Hmm, women like men who pass their tests, and (PUA) men like women who test them. Is there a difference in motivations here?

    Why should we encourage women to be less assholish in the pickup arena? What are they doing wrong?
16. 

    Lucky 72 April 20, 2011 at 7:58 pm #

    @ Sagredo

    From a feminist point of view, interfering with women’s ability to reject men in the name of ethics is going to be a non-starter.

    I didn’t moan about women rejecting men; it’s their right obviously. I moaned about women rejecting men harshly. Some women are real bithces about this. Sorry, but that’s just a fact.

    If you are going to reject someone (who has not been stepping outside any social boundaries in a big way), please just do it nicely, don’t be like a harpy on amphetamine.

    To much to ask? I think not.

    L
17. 

    Lucky 72 April 20, 2011 at 7:59 pm #

    @ Sagredo

    Why should we encourage women to be less assholish in the pickup arena? What are they doing wrong?

    A lot of things. Want a list?

    L
18. 

    Clarisse April 20, 2011 at 10:15 pm #

    @Sagredo — Hmm, women like men who pass their tests, and (PUA) men like women who test them. Is there a difference in motivations here?

    I can fix this for you. It should read:

    Hmm, some women like men who pass their tests, and (PUA) men like women who test them. Is there a difference in motivations here?

    Also, I’m not convinced that “tests” is the best metaphor for flirtatious behavior. It’s the metaphor PUAs have chosen, but that doesn’t mean it’s what most people flirting are actually thinking. I use the phrase “shit tests” only because it’s a description of a real phenomenon, but I think the whole concept has serious problems.

    As for what women are doing wrong in the dating arena, I’m tempted to say “sure let’s talk about what people think women are doing ‘wrong’ as long as we also make equally long lists of what men do ‘wrong’”, but frankly I’d really like to avoid turning this thread into a bitchfest. Is there a way to approach what you’re trying to ask that won’t encourage anger and defensiveness?
19. 

    Infra April 20, 2011 at 10:41 pm #

    @Clarisse:

    I use the phrase “shit tests” only because it’s a description of a real phenomenon, but I think the whole concept has serious problems.

    On this subject… have you seen Mark’s post on it, from earlier this month?
20. 

    Clarisse April 20, 2011 at 10:55 pm #

    I hadn’t seen that! I like that guy a lot already and I’ve only read three posts so far.
21. 

    AB April 21, 2011 at 5:10 am #

    I love Mark’s post, it explains so much, like how often the things I’ve said to dissuade guys have had the opposite effect – it wasn’t that the guys didn’t respect what I said, it was just that they thought “I’m a virgin, I just broke up with my boyfriend because he wanted to have sex with me, and I feel so relieved not being in a relationship” meant “I want to go home with you right now, lock myself in your bedroom for a week, have hot and passionate sex with you the whole time, and then get married afterwards”.

    I also can’t help thinking of the proverb “Tyv tror hvermand stjæler”. You probably have a similar one in English, it means “Thief thinks every man steals”, and refer to the way people prone to seeing their own motivations in the actions of others. Many guys seem to be testing frequently, especially PUAs, so it’s no surprise if they see the same behaviour in others. Or perhaps it’s just the case of how, once you get a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

    I think the observation that these things are more frequent in relationships is spot on. Granted, I can’t relate to the idea that shit-tests happen daily, but when I asked my boyfriend, he could relate. Or rather, he couldn’t recognise any of the behaviours listed, but when I explained the motivation, to see if he was still interested in me, he said that it happened fairly often. It’s just that I’m more obvious in my approach, and will tell him directly when I need him to show more affection and tell me I’m desirable, rather than trying to manipulate him into showing it. That might be why I’m only a lesser beta, and it certainly explains why I confuse the hell out of guys ;-)
22. 

    k April 21, 2011 at 9:25 am #

    I really like that “shit test” post you linked, Infra, but I don’t understand the concept of a shit test in general, it seems to suggest that women play all kinds of conscious games to test men, which is not my experience. What exactly is a shit test supposed to be testing for?
23. 

    Sam April 21, 2011 at 10:39 am #

    Clarisse,

    also read the Shit Test Paranoia post, and I think it’s generally true. Teasing is the best thing ever, particularly when flirting, so yeah. That said, I’m really not sure about the second part of the post, where he explains the assumed motivational aspects for women saying “you must be gay”. That’s a bit weird. I’ve hardly never actually heard that said either to me or anyone else. Also –

    “The most popular example is the so-called “I have a boyfriend” shit test. This isn’t a shit test.”

    is *can also be* a shit test, as I think I’ve explained before. It’s probably not as common as a shit test as a statement of fact, but it still *can be* a shit test. I once approached a girl for a younger acquaintance who was too shy to do it himself at the time and after a minute after we all introduced ourselves she mentioned she had a boyfriend. He walked off at the next opportunity, I stayed and talked to her and her sister. We had a great time, and after a while she said… “you know, I don’t actually have a boyfriend, I just say that to screen out boys…”

    Just saying.
24. 

    AB April 21, 2011 at 11:44 am #

    @Sam:

    is *can also be* a shit test, as I think I’ve explained before. It’s probably not as common as a shit test as a statement of fact, but it still *can be* a shit test.

    And why is that so important to focus on? PUA screening techniques are shit-tests too (at least in the PU sense of the word), and guys tend to play hard to get whenever they can get away with it. But if a woman made just half the assumptions about men as is made about women in the SC, would be labelled misandry in a heartbeat.

    Thinking about it, freeze-outs can be shit-tests too. If the woman is desperate enough to become sexually compliant under the threat of losing his attention, she’s a doormat he can make do anything. And women should be made aware that even though he’ll play mindgames to try to take over control of the relationship and change who she is, what he really hopes for is that she’ll be strong and stand up to him, or he’ll leave her for a woman who’s more of an alpha.
25. 

    Sam April 21, 2011 at 12:01 pm #

    AB,

    I think tests have their place for either party. The term “shit test” seems more as an institutionalised colloquialism than a useful description of one or more kinds of tests. Shit tests are, in my opinion, usually better labeled as “dominance tests”, or in the example I’ve given, as “perseverence” indicator.

    “But if a woman made just half the assumptions about men as is made about women in the SC, would be labelled misandry in a heartbeat.”

    Yeah, well, I believe when it comes to social/female assumptions about male mating habits, misandry often isn’t too farfetched a concept.

    “Thinking about it, freeze-outs can be shit-tests too.”

    *Anything* can be a test. It depends on the interpreation. That’s why the post at the other blog used the term “paranoia”.
26. 

    Sagredo April 21, 2011 at 12:04 pm #

    actually more attracted to women who have bitch shields, give shit tests, etc.

    OK,

    For them, a large amount of their attraction to the game is sense of accomplishment.

    When women like men who pass their tests, is it merely for a sense of accomplishment in successful screening?

    In general, I’m very suspicious of assigning non-sexual non-relationship motives to PUA. It’s ironic, really, men are correctly accused of sexual motives for all kinds of behaviour, mostly bad behaviour, and PUA is the one place where those motives are overt, and then one hears claims that PUA is really about male bonding, or really about passing tests for their own sake, or whatever.

    Actually, bitch shields, testing etc. can also be demonstrations of higher value, and sometimes men like a little high value in their women too…
27. 

    Clarisse April 21, 2011 at 1:44 pm #

    Here’s a definition of shit tests:
    http://www.pualingo.com/pua-definitions/shit-test/

    @Sam — We had a great time, and after a while she said… “you know, I don’t actually have a boyfriend, I just say that to screen out boys…”

    Argh, this makes me so mad. Not just because the minority of women who do this then create a bad precedent for everyone else, but also because it seems like it’s transparently not in her best interest, too. She’s basically screening for guys who disrespect her current relationship status. Why? Why?! WHY?!

    Well … now that I think about it, she could also be screening for guys who are willing to talk to her as a friend and don’t just boil her down to “potential sexual partner or nothing”. Guys like you, for example. So I guess maybe it’s a decent screening tactic, as long as she also feels confident that she can screen out guys who disrespect her preferences by other means. But it’s still dishonest, and I wouldn’t use it.

    @Sagredo — In general, I’m very suspicious of assigning non-sexual non-relationship motives to PUA. It’s ironic, really, men are correctly accused of sexual motives for all kinds of behaviour, mostly bad behaviour, and PUA is the one place where those motives are overt, and then one hears claims that PUA is really about male bonding, or really about passing tests for their own sake, or whatever.

    Hmm, that’s not exactly what I meant. I think that the “sense of accomplishment” thing is sexual. It seems to be very sexually/emotionally powerful for many men to feel like they have accomplished getting a high-status girl, even when those men don’t chase girls regularly. I mean, people do obviously look for partners who are high-value in their eyes (with value being established by different things for different people).

    When women like men who pass their tests, is it merely for a sense of accomplishment in successful screening?

    Maybe. I think most real tests actually mean something, though. You’re screening for something more important than “performance of dominance”. I just think that a lot of things PUAs think are tests aren’t actually tests.
28. 

    AB April 21, 2011 at 4:18 pm #

    @Sam:

    *Anything* can be a test. It depends on the interpreation. That’s why the post at the other blog used the term “paranoia”.

    It’s more than that though. One of the posts answering Mark said: “I know I’m gonna generalize but, what woman doesn’t act like this? What woman doesn’t reject you whe she really likes you? What woman doesn’t play games? That’s the confusion about this article and shit-tests in the real world women try to confuse you they don’t want to show they like you even though they do.”

    It’s funny because Infra just made a post in the ethical pick-up artistry about PUAs attempting to increase their perceived value by making the girls chase them and try to prove themselves worthy instead of vice versa. Or in other words, pretty much the same tactic as what this guy claims women are doing.

    And I can’t help remembering the anecdote Clarisse brought up about how the woman who finally made Neil Strauss fall in love reacted to his freeze-out by ignoring him and going to sleep, rather than taking the bait. And while I have gotten a lot of attention from guys by being insecure, I can’t help noticing that the attention I get when I’m comfortable with myself, and not worried about being good enough, is usually longer lasting, more profound, and coming from better guys than when I’m too eager to please.

    Now, combine that observation with the prevalent view of women in relationships (and according to many PUAs, everywhere else too) – that they’ll try to dominate a guy and then tire of him if he doesn’t resist. Or in other words, they’ll fight to get control but ultimately be more attracted to the people who wont let themselves be controlled. Just like how it seems men (even Neil Strauss himself) tend to behave.

    For all the PUA theories about different evolutionary roles, and for all they talk about women as a different species than themselves, the more I read about them the more it strikes me what an excellent argument they make for the opposite, that men and women are actually very alike and after the same thing.
29. 

    Sagredo April 21, 2011 at 4:57 pm #

    As to whether something is a test or not, instead of considering the intent of the (alleged) tester, it’s worth looking at the situation of the tested. If the latter needs to stop and figure out how to behave, it is for them functionally a test. It’s a bit unfortunate because calling something a test, and especially calling something a “shit test”, does tend to make a claim about the intent of the tester which may not actually be warranted.

    A lot of “playful banter” falls into this category. For some folks, there’s no worries about it, it’s as natural as any other kind of play and it seems like there’s nothing being tested. Other folk who are not so good at it, need to make an effort in figuring out how to respond, aware that if they do so badly, they’ll be less successful in the interaction. For them it really is a test.

    Ideally this sort of thing is a mutual exchange, but if you’re on the “testing” side at a juncture (with some particular remark or whatever), it’s worth bearing in mind how the other’s response will affect your opinion of them, even if you’re not actually thinking this will test you, my pretty. I for one become enormously attracted to anyone who shows a particular kind of creative wit and like to give people an opportunity to show it off to me whenever I can.
30. 

    Jim April 21, 2011 at 5:03 pm #

    “Why? Why?! WHY?!”

    Because maybe it flatters her vanity to think that she is such a hot catch that a guy will do anything………?

    The corellary to AB’s proverb is that it’s hard for a healthy person to understand dysfunction. Ask anyone who has wandered into a relationship with an narcissist or BPD person. Understanding comes very slowly if ever.
31. 

    Lucky 72 April 21, 2011 at 5:53 pm #

    @ Sam

    … women saying “you must be gay”. That’s a bit weird. I’ve hardly never actually heard that said either to me or anyone else.

    I had a “You dance like a gay!” hurled at me by a girl I had been flirting with just this Saturday. It might of course be true for all I know.

    Oh, that was an entire case study in pernicious female behaviour on the dating scene. Still kinda fun. But I’m really getting to old for that kinda thing. A simple yes/no would do the trick for me. Alas, there was hoop jumping all night.

    L
32. 

    Infra April 21, 2011 at 7:28 pm #

    @Sam:

    That said, I’m really not sure about the second part of the post, where he explains the assumed motivational aspects for women saying “you must be gay”. That’s a bit weird. I’ve hardly never actually heard that said either to me or anyone else.

    I’ve gotten it on more than a few occasions. But that point needs to be taken in the context of what Mark wrote about grooming, sensitivity, etc. Those things are, stereotypically, associated with gay men, and IME, when a guy displays them to any substantial degree, the “are you gay?” test isn’t all that uncommon.

    @AB:

    It’s funny because Infra just made a post in the ethical pick-up artistry about PUAs attempting to increase their perceived value by making the girls chase them and try to prove themselves worthy instead of vice versa.

    Way to misrepresent what I wrote. I did not say that any of it was about boosting perceived value by making girls chase the guy. That’s your inference, not part of my argument.
33. 

    nathan April 21, 2011 at 8:52 pm #

    Clarisse #14

    “I have a working theory that men who are into PUA are (a) into making sure that they can get ANY woman (as Kezia encourages) and (b) actually more attracted to women who have bitch shields, give shit tests, etc. For them, a large amount of their attraction to the game is sense of accomplishment.”

    Makes sense to me, for the majority of guys into PUA. If you’re into games, you’ll attract them. This goes for PUA dudes and for shit-test loving women. Winning the girl or guy is one accomplishment. Another is being able to mindfuck those you have no interest in.

    I still think there is a minority of guys trying out PUA methods because they don’t know what else to do. Which is why it’s worth considering what might be salvageable from PUA.

    And I also think it’s important to keep questioning the generalizations underpinning dating behavior. When I hear women say things like “men are just after one thing,” it drives me nuts. At the same time, while I have experienced some shit testing, I don’t think I could even assign the majority of women I have been interested in into such a category. For every shit tester I have experienced, there has been two women who were just as befuddled about how to deal with dating as I am.

    I kind of think bitch shields, shit tests, PUA tactics, and the rest are really attempts to gain a sense of control in the very fluid field of modern dating.
34. 

    Sam April 21, 2011 at 10:04 pm #

    Clarisse,

    Well … now that I think about it, she could also be screening for guys who are willing to talk to her as a friend and don’t just boil her down to “potential sexual partner or nothing”.

    exactly. “I have a boyfriend” translates as “I’m not interested in (just) having sex with you”.

    “But it’s still dishonest, and I wouldn’t use it.”

    But really, so much actual communication is built upon superficial dishonesty. As we’ve so often said, yes, it would be totally cool if people were able to be both aware of and honestly verbally communicate their preferences. But in the real world, that just doesn’t seem to be the case for most people, even assuming they have stable preferences, which is also questionable. I mean, think Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory – his inability to interact with people is mostly based on his inability to contextualize ambiguous/untrue statements. Dishonesty certainly has useful, even ethical, applications in human interactions – take, well, rejections as an example: isn’t it better to let people down gently with a euphemism or a white lie, a statement that could be true? Of course, there’s increased potential for misunderstandings, but it’s also a lot better at ego-protection.

    AB,

    “What woman doesn’t play games?”

    everyone plays games, whether we call them games, or culture, or scripts.

    “the more I read about them the more it strikes me what an excellent argument they make for the opposite, that men and women are actually very alike and after the same thing.”

    The same but still different. People are looking for perceived value and self-affirmation, but the ways in which this value is expressed and received is usually still very different. But I do agree with you that a lot of behavioral suggestions for men from the SC are about imitating behavior generally considered female. I would suggest that that’s a consequence of what I think DLR said in his comment about confidence in the thread about “fear and sluthood in SF”. Imitating female behavior is very likely a great way of demonstrating/pretending that these men are not affected by sexual scarcity, which, in turn will make them more attractive and reduce their perceived sexual scarcity. There’s a lot of “don’t look if you want to find” mental gymnastics in this that require a mindset in the way DLR describes in that comment, but yeah. I also think that the SC is prescribing a lot of classic “feminine” behavior.
35. 

    Infra April 21, 2011 at 10:21 pm #

    @Clarisse:

    Well … now that I think about it, she could also be screening for guys who are willing to talk to her as a friend and don’t just boil her down to “potential sexual partner or nothing”.

    There’s also the possibility that continuing to talk to her after hearing that can signal that the guy doesn’t buy into the idea of “has boyfriend = is owned and off limits.” It can be a way of rejecting the view of her, as a woman, as property.
36. 

    Mark April 22, 2011 at 1:49 am #

    “I still think there is a minority of guys trying out PUA methods because they don’t know what else to do. Which is why it’s worth considering what might be salvageable from PUA.”

    This is actually backwards. The “have sex with every girl you meet” meme is a marketing trick and really only peddled by the most successful or commercial PUA’s. The VAST and silent majority of the market is merely interested in getting a date, getting a girlfriend, etc., etc.

    Other than that, I must say I’m surprised/impressed to see such an accurate and honest discussion about PUA stuff here.

    Re: “I have a boyfriend,” this is one of those things that it depends on how and when it’s said. But generally speaking, even if I think a girl is lying and just using this to screen me, I’m about 99% likely to ditch her on the spot. It’s fickle and dishonest and ultimately ineffective for the reason Clarisse mentioned.

    I’ll put it this way, I’ve never fought through a “I have a boyfriend,” statement and thought afterward, “Wow, what an amazing and exciting girl, I’m so glad I wasn’t dissuaded by her lying.” Never happens.

    Re: “You must be gay,” not every guy gets this, but it’s probably the most common in the PUA community. Most guys get it often. One is because most PUA guys are effeminate guys. But the other reason is because PUA encourages them to act a little flamboyant and ostentatious.

    I still get it frequently (well, in the US I get it), and I’d say 80% of the time it’s from a girl who is quite attracted to me.
37. 

    AB April 22, 2011 at 4:57 am #

    @Infra:

    Way to misrepresent what I wrote. I did not say that any of it was about boosting perceived value by making girls chase the guy. That’s your inference, not part of my argument.

    You’re right, it was badly phrased. It should have been the opposite really, making the girls chase them by boosting their perceived value. The point still stands though.
38. 

    AB April 22, 2011 at 5:24 am #

    @Sam:

    Well … now that I think about it, she could also be screening for guys who are willing to talk to her as a friend and don’t just boil her down to “potential sexual partner or nothing”.

    exactly. “I have a boyfriend” translates as “I’m not interested in (just) having sex with you”.

    Here’s a pretty good illustration of the mentality she might wish to avoid in guys who approach her (and it’s allegedly not a parody, the audience is seriously expected to sympathise with the guy). Notice how, as soon as her relationship status is revealed, the woman’s speech bubbles literally translate into ‘Blah blah blah’, as if all interaction with her was rendered useless as soon as a sexual relationship was no longer an option. I hate to play these games, but something like that makes even me want to lie about it when I don’t have a bf, just to get Nice Guys to leave me alone.

    AB,

    “What woman doesn’t play games?”

    everyone plays games, whether we call them games, or culture, or scripts.

    Which is why having everything ascribed to one’s sex is so frustrating. At least for me.

    The same but still different. People are looking for perceived value and self-affirmation, but the ways in which this value is expressed and received is usually still very different. But I do agree with you that a lot of behavioral suggestions for men from the SC are about imitating behavior generally considered female. I would suggest that that’s a consequence of what I think DLR said in his comment about confidence in the thread about “fear and sluthood in SF”. Imitating female behavior is very likely a great way of demonstrating/pretending that these men are not affected by sexual scarcity, which, in turn will make them more attractive and reduce their perceived sexual scarcity. There’s a lot of “don’t look if you want to find” mental gymnastics in this that require a mindset in the way DLR describes in that comment, but yeah. I also think that the SC is prescribing a lot of classic “feminine” behavior.

    I think men in general exhibit a lot of ‘feminine’ behaviour. Sometimes even more than women, because women are called out on it more often. And women exhibit a lot of ‘masculine’ behaviours too. I prefer to use a variation of Occam’s razor: If the behaviours of both men and women can be explained both by them having many of the same basic needs and motivations, and by complicated evo-psych models casting the sexes as radically different, the first (and simpler) explanation is usually the most accurate one.
39. 

    k April 22, 2011 at 7:08 am #

    Thanks for the “shit test” definition Clarisse! Wow the jargon was thick on the ground in that post though.

    Mark, I agree with you on this:

    Re: “I have a boyfriend,” this is one of those things that it depends on how and when it’s said. But generally speaking, even if I think a girl is lying and just using this to screen me, I’m about 99% likely to ditch her on the spot. It’s fickle and dishonest and ultimately ineffective for the reason Clarisse mentioned.

    Really, if someone is being dishonest about themselves, I’d prefer not to talk to that person. Which is one of the issues I have with some pick up tactics, as a woman. If a guy comes up to me with some kind of an odd canned joke or w/e, I just get the feeling we wouldn’t get along. I totally think men who get rude responses to their approaches should feel free to screen women based on rudeness.

    In fact, that’s something I also don’t get about pick up tactics… a lot of them seem based on some version of the sunk cost fallacy that supposes 1 drink or 10 minutes of conversation are high enough sunk costs to justify putting up with rudeness or ignoring obvious attempts at rejection, just to keep the conversation going and the “game” continuing.

    Are there guys who find that this strategy works for them? It frankly doesn’t sound like much fun to me!
40. 

    k April 22, 2011 at 7:13 am #

    And that “nice guy” comic? Yikes. Frankly a lot of the time if I mention my boyfriend, it’s so that guys I’m talking to will hopefully be certain we are having a FRIENDLY conversation and be able to relax around me and adjust accordingly. At least, when a guy mentions his girlfriend, that’s what I do – relax, because it lowers the stakes of the conversation and makes it clear there will be no hurt feelings at the end of the evening when I leave without him.

    Any male perspectives on this?
41. 

    nathan April 22, 2011 at 9:17 am #

    Mark,

    “The “have sex with every girl you meet” meme is a marketing trick and really only peddled by the most successful or commercial PUA’s. The VAST and silent majority of the market is merely interested in getting a date, getting a girlfriend, etc., etc.” It depends, I suppose, on what you would define as “the PUA community.” If you’re including any guy who takes a few pick up tactics and gives them a whirl, then I might be able to agree with you.

    But with this from Clarisse “into making sure that they can get ANY woman (as Kezia encourages)” – I saw her as saying that PUA methods give these guys a sense of confidence that they CAN get any woman. They don’t need to “have sex with every woman they meet,” but they enjoy the fact that they believe they have the skills to do so. I see it as a confidence derived from some level of success in playing a game, which basically translates in their heads as “I’m the shit, and the women all know it.” They might have a long term girlfriend, but in the back of their mind be thinking “If this doesn’t work out, I can always get another one.”

    Another reason I agreed with Clarisse’s statement is that I think viewing dating as “a game” is inherent in these approaches, and so it makes sense to me that a guy who thinks that way would attract women who also play games. Again, I think there are plenty of guys out there who don’t see dating as a game who might lift a few pick up tactics from a PUA forum and try them out. But are they representative of PUA as a whole? I’d say that’s a stretch.

    k #40

    When I hear the words “I have a boyfriend,” I essentially drop any sense that we might get together. So, yes, it does relax that element. But if she’s testing me, then she’s basically lost me because I’m not interested in pushing through that kind of shit.

    As to the Nice Guy meme – I’m not sure what the hell to do with it. I believe I tend to be perceived this way, although I’m no push over who aims to please all the time. But I also wonder how often men with good intentions are mistaken for this Nice Guy prototype who acts nice and pleasing when he thinks he has a shot at sex or a relationship, but turns that off when he doesn’t.
42. 

    Mark April 22, 2011 at 11:14 am #

    @k

    “In fact, that’s something I also don’t get about pick up tactics… a lot of them seem based on some version of the sunk cost fallacy that supposes 1 drink or 10 minutes of conversation are high enough sunk costs to justify putting up with rudeness or ignoring obvious attempts at rejection, just to keep the conversation going and the “game” continuing.

    Are there guys who find that this strategy works for them? It frankly doesn’t sound like much fun to me!”

    I totally agree with you, but unfortunately I’m in the minority when it comes to pick up coaches on this. I think for inexperienced guys, it can be a good social exercise to push through and try to win over a girl who is initially cold. But from a practical stand point, just move on.

    @nathan

    “But with this from Clarisse “into making sure that they can get ANY woman (as Kezia encourages)” – I saw her as saying that PUA methods give these guys a sense of confidence that they CAN get any woman. They don’t need to “have sex with every woman they meet,” but they enjoy the fact that they believe they have the skills to do so. I see it as a confidence derived from some level of success in playing a game, which basically translates in their heads as “I’m the shit, and the women all know it.” They might have a long term girlfriend, but in the back of their mind be thinking “If this doesn’t work out, I can always get another one.”

    Again, this is kind of the way it’s all presented, but it almost never plays out this way. Market surveys done by myself, other coaches and large forums find a few things consistently:

    - Something like 60% of the guys who read this stuff only read it to address one very specific problem (i.e., how to ask the cute girl in class for her number, etc.)

    - Like 80% of the guys, once they experience some success (they get laid a couple times, they get a girlfriend), they’re never heard from again.

    The marketing is laid out like that because that casts the widest net. Whether you want to get a date with a girl you know, or whether you want to fuck 1000 girls, if I tell you I can help you get “ANY GIRL” then both of you will buy.

    The point I’m making I guess, is don’t mistake the marketing message of a minority of the companies, with the intentions and motivations of 80% of the actual guys out doing this stuff. That’s all I’m saying.

    And I agree in regards to the “dating as a game” observations.
43. 

    Sam April 22, 2011 at 12:42 pm #

    AB,

    Which is why having everything ascribed to one’s sex is so frustrating. At least for me.

    Well, roles are usually embodied and thus gendered, regardless of the extent to which the scripts are referencing genetically disposed behaviour or culturally extrapolated behaviour. That creates expectations and thus allows a significant reduction of interactional complexity. Of course, that only works for the majority of people who are able and willing to play by the rules. But those arguing for complete hacking of scripts and gendered behavioral expectations because they are perceived as limiting individual degress of freedom are usually not considering the behavioural costs that are incurred for the majority by abolishing behavioral scripts. If scripts are abolished because the costs of limiting individual expression is seen as more important, then the costs born by other people have to be balanced by giving them individual tools to deal with the increased complexity. On a meta level, I would consider the SC as a reaction to the increasing lack of social mediation of human mating and the accordingly increased flexibility of individual behaviour.

    k,

    I totally think men who get rude responses to their approaches should feel free to screen women based on rudeness.

    absolutely. It’s just not that easy, because people want to be liked. It’s the same behavioural mechanism that “negs” are based on – if the rudeness is not downright assholish and obviously disqualifies someone on a personal level, then people are likely going to want to work towards being approved by person rejecting them before. I think the SC advice in that respect is decent – “never chase a bad set” – but it’s really something I suppose guys need to remember in those sunk cost scenarios you mention, because I think it’s really easy to fall into the “like me”-attraction-trap that minor rudeness can create (in both directions).

    relax, because it lowers the stakes of the conversation and makes it clear there will be no hurt feelings at the end of the evening when I leave without him.

    sure. But at the same time, if true, it takes options off the table that he may be interested in. So, *if* a guy is really looking for a woman who may be interested in sex, soonish, hearing that a girl he’s talking to has a boyfriend – and believing it – will definitely relax the conversation, but potentially also make him look for an exit, as a friendly conversation will likely *not* be what he is looking for.

    The most honest answer in such a situation would probably be – look, it’s really fun talking to you, and I’d like to continue because I like you, but I am really horny tonight and I’m not so sure staying and chatting with you will improve my chances of finding a girl who doesn’t have a boyfriend and is in a similar state of mind.”

    My best guess would be that staying and having fun *would improve* his chances, because a guy who’s having fun with a girl/group of girls is likely more attractive to women than a guy roaming a venue on his own, but that’s something that could depend on the situation.
44. 

    k April 22, 2011 at 2:10 pm #

    Thanks nathan, Mark & Sam.

    nathan: I think the “nice guy” thing is a concept most people hear about via the internet, and a lot of people have probably never heard of it. Personally, I think that if you are interested in genuine friendships with women, ones that aren’t intended to weasel your way into a relationship, you are probably fine.

    Mark: I’m glad to hear someone who is apparently into this pick up thing agree with me that it isn’t all that awesome to try and plow past someone’s rudeness and/or rejections. That concept just bugs me in so many ways, not only because it isn’t “practical” (frankly talking about effectiveness in this context cracks my shit up, no idea why) but also because it is essentially asking men to put themselves in emotionally shredding situations over and over again, basically reward bad behavior from rude women, AND demonstrate a lack of respect for the boundaries of women who aren’t interested. In that context I can’t help but think that “success” would come at a high personal cost. Sure it can be a good exercise to prove that one can speak with nasty or ambivalent people, but in the long term, who wants to fuck someone who’s mean or ambivalent? Whenever I get harshly rejected by a man, I try to think, “Wow, thank goodness he showed me his nasty side before I actually started caring much about his approval”.

    Sam, you talked about mild rudeness and approval too, and I wonder if one of the issues with pick up tactics is that they could make guys think even more than before that the reactions of essentially random women – who could be uninterested, bored, not heterosexual, or even just complete assholes – prove something about the men who are trying to approach them. That’s a sad thought to me. It’s always dangerous to base one’s self-worth on the opinions and reactions of others.

    Of course on the other hand, men are also encouraged to approach LOTS of women, so maybe that helps dull the sting of rejection somewhat? Hmm.
45. 

    k April 22, 2011 at 2:20 pm #

    Oh, and Sam, I liked what you mentioned about continuing to talk to someone even if that conversation is not an obvious means to an end. The spontaneous, random nature of social interaction is something that, in my limited experience, doesn’t seem to make it into pick up advice very often. That always confused me, because when I think of the times I’ve had romantic or sexual success as a single person, it almost always resulted from a series of fortuitous coincidences – starting to talk to someone who is coupled up, but there with friends, can easily set off a bit of a chain reaction.

    Having a conscious goal or set of tactics would probably be a detriment to just letting things happen for a couple of hours, with the only criterion for what I was doing being “this is fun, I’ll go with it”.

    Perhaps this is an overtly female perspective or something, but it’s exactly what I suggest to male friends too. And often, it ends up working for them as well.
46. 

    DFL April 22, 2011 at 3:07 pm #

    k,

    I’m not sure that the “nice guy”concept is an internet fad. According to wikipedia, the quote “nice guys finish last” hails back to the 1930s (although it was used in a baseball context back then, not sure when it first got applied to romantic relationships). I also think that quite a few people have heard about the idea. For example, a German pop band of the 90s had a number 8 chart hit based on that concept (Die Prinzen – Schwein sein).

    Also, the idea of “nice guy” friendships as weaseling his way into a relationship is, of course, a pretty negative view. A more charitable view would be that the “nice guy” is lacking the communicative means to transform the relationship to the woman he likes into a romantic relationship.
47. 

    Sagredo April 22, 2011 at 3:38 pm #

    New rule: if someone says “I have a boy/girlfriend” but ends up having sex with you anyway, you don’t have to call them in the morning.
48. 

    Sam April 22, 2011 at 3:42 pm #

    k,

    The spontaneous, random nature of social interaction is something that, in my limited experience, doesn’t seem to make it into pick up advice very often.

    hmm, actually, I think it does, there’s lots of advice about being “fun and sociable” and if you add up some other stuff, say advice about “social proof” and “preselection by women”, “having no expectations about interactional results, because they will stifle spontaneity”, and “going in with high enery” I supppose that sort of equals “being open to a fun social interaction”, but it probably doesn’t get as much attention as other advice, possibly because people consider it as basic. But I totally agree with you that being social in a group is probably the easiest way to meet other poeple quickly, and without having to do a cold approach.

    AB,

    btw, some of those nice guy comics are actually quite funny :)
49. 

    Sagredo April 22, 2011 at 4:17 pm #

    AB, I don’t mind similar behaviour assigned to a similarity in gender. But there is a toxic line of thought that runs men and women are the same except for social effects, so when they behave differently, the male behaviour is wrong. One of the things I’m seeing underlying criticism of PUA coming from feminist directions is a failure to appreciate the nature of male desire. It’s actually not helpful to judge male sexuality against a norm of female sexuality. For instance, desire generally is partly desire of a body. But if there’s too much focus on the body, as measured against this norm, it’s castigated as “objectifying”. We need to recognise this as a personal preference and not an ethical statement.

    Actually, it helps to look at gay men to get an idea of how many het men would prefer to behave if they could. A bathhouse providing endless availability of semi-anonymous heterosex would be very popular with men (some) if women were into it. Those men are not wrong to want that, just as women are not wrong to not want that.

    Once one accepts that men and women have different kinds of desires, both as genders and as individuals, and that both are entitled to their desires even if not to any particular outcome, we can then figure out what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour.
50. 

    nathan April 22, 2011 at 8:11 pm #

    Co-sign on DFL’s comments at #46. And my point above K wasn’t about friendships. I agreed with you that if a woman says she’s got a boyfriend, I drop thoughts about a relationship with her. In fact, I have several long term, platonic friendships with women, and the majority of my friends are women.

    What I was pointing out with the “nice guy” meme is that I wonder how many men who display some of those traits get overlooked for romantic relationships by women who think they actually fulfill that stereotype?

    One of the reasons I’m not too keen on PUA – from what I have seen anyway – is that there are so many presumptions made about what women think, and why they are acting in certain ways. And furthermore, I think, there are a lot of presumptions of about male behavior as well.

    So, the reason I am pointing out the “nice guy” meme is that it is something I have experienced firsthand – being skipped over because I appeared to be a “nice guy” with no backbone – and also because it’s a reoccurring theme in women’s writing about dating – feminist, or otherwise. And I think whenever a theme keeps reoccurring in dating narratives that generalizes based on gender, red flags should go up.

    (Yes, I’ve read a lot of dating material – everything from research in academic journals to Cosmo to online dating forums. It’s just such an interesting subject.)

    DFL “A more charitable view would be that the “nice guy” is lacking the communicative means to transform the relationship to the woman he likes into a romantic relationship.”

    I think that covers a certain percentage of guys who are placed into that category – rightly or wrongly – but there are also another percentage that are just slower to warm up, to make moves, etc. That’s where I fall in anyway. I rarely am quick to flirt, ask direct questions about interest, etc. But once I know a woman a little more, I’m just fine ramping things up.

    Yet, I’ve learned that this delay on my part has been construed in many ways. He’s not interested. He’s just a nice guy. He’s inexperienced. He’s gay. All these assumptions, when the reality is that I just don’t jump into things.

    Now, one thing I find interesting – going back to a few older posts Clarisse made – are all the issues around who is expected to initiate romantic/sexual relationship and why. The double-bind women are in where being the initiator often has stigmas attached to it (whore/slut/etc), and not initiating leaves them in a position of waiting for men to do so (in hetero situations anyway.) And for us men, there’s an expectation much of the time that we will do the calling, e-mailing, asking out, moving into to touch, kiss, and on and on. Not doing this quickly enough, and naturally enough – which is the position I’m usually in – means you might get dismissed in some way.

    Oh, and the thing about rejection K, Sam, and others mention – I almost never have experienced outright rude rejection. Then again, I’m not one to try and pick up strangers in bars, or other public places. My experience has been much more that women won’t say a thing and just disappear. Not return e-mails or calls. That kind of thing. Perhaps this is the variation that comes when you are not aggressively seeking a hook up or date the same night.
51. 

    Infra April 22, 2011 at 10:58 pm #

    @k, as far as perspectives go:

    Really, if someone is being dishonest about themselves, I’d prefer not to talk to that person.

    Personally, I tend to give people some space to lie, and it’s how and why they make use of that opportunity, not if, that matters.

    Reason being, I see it as a bit of a disservice not to give them that opportunity: providing them with the space to lie is also to show them that there’s a space that they will always have as their own. (I can handle being deceived, so long as it’s for a good reason. The thing that I will not tolerate is being treated as if I’m too dense to know when it’s happening.)

    It isn’t the only space, of course. But it’s one of them, and provides freedom of movement; and I’ve found that once that’s acknowledged, the need to lie seems to be lessened. More often than not, it results in becoming privy to secrets — to the things that they lie to other people about.

    In fact, that’s something I also don’t get about pick up tactics… a lot of them seem based on some version of the sunk cost fallacy that supposes 1 drink or 10 minutes of conversation are high enough sunk costs to justify putting up with rudeness or ignoring obvious attempts at rejection, just to keep the conversation going and the “game” continuing.

    I have my limits when it comes to rudeness, and I don’t ignore obvious attempts at rejection. But I do have some tolerance for rudeness and the like; similar to the above, it’s just recognizing that no one has an obligation to be nice from the get-go, especially if they’re likely to be exposed to rude or nefarious behaviors in the situation, themselves (as is often the case at bars). It isn’t a sunk cost issue, it’s just recognizing that things aren’t always personal.

    It frankly doesn’t sound like much fun to me!

    No, it isn’t always fun, and even when most of it is, not all of it always is. But that’s often the way of human interaction, and I consider these things to be part of accepting another person’s humanity. Thorns don’t ruin the rose.

    Frankly a lot of the time if I mention my boyfriend, it’s so that guys I’m talking to will hopefully be certain we are having a FRIENDLY conversation and be able to relax around me and adjust accordingly.

    It’s a bit of a double-edged sword that way. It can work to set the context for a friendly conversation, but it can also communicate that she simply assumed that my motivations were sexual, which can make the tone of things into a distinctly unfriendly one. But that goes to what I wrote above regarding rudeness. (Not that I’m saying that mentioning a boyfriend is rude, just that this involves taking previous experiences and reasonable expectations into account, and weighing it against the possibility that she’s going on stereotype.)

    I won’t tune out when I hear it… unless she mentions her boyfriend much more often than she mentions other people, or uses him as a common point of reference. That, to me, tends to suggest an unhealthy relationship dynamic, or the use of our conversation as a way of discussing things that she doesn’t get to discuss with her friends (possibly because they’re tired of hearing it), and I’ll be inclined to cut the conversation short.
52. 

    Infra April 23, 2011 at 3:07 am #

    @Sagredo:

    Actually, it helps to look at gay men to get an idea of how many het men would prefer to behave if they could.

    From what I’ve seen, the average number of sexual partners for a gay man is pretty much the same as that for a het one:

    Median Reported Sex Partners

    * straight men: 6
    * gay men: 6
    * straight women: 6
    * gay women: 6

    (Source: OkCupid, but I’ve come across similar data in reference to the GSS.)
53. 

    Hugh Ristik April 23, 2011 at 4:48 am #

    In my experience, pretty much everything in this article is true. As someone with extensive experience with the seduction community, everything he talks about is familiar to me, and causes me to chuckle while reading. It’s nice to see accurate and tempered criticisms of the seduction community from someone who understands it.

    That being said, outsiders of the seduction community (particularly those who already have a beef with it), might get some skewed ideas about the community from this article.

    The original title of the article was “Detrimental Attitudes You Can Pick Up Through The Seduction Community”, not “Detrimental Attitudes of the Pickup Artist Community”. Chris didn’t make any claims of prevalence about the attitudes he criticizes. Someone, particularly a biased reader, could walk away from this article thinking that most or all PUAs hold most or all of these attitudes. That’s dubious.

    The actual proportion of the seduction community who holds these attitudes depends on how you define “PUAs” and who exactly counts as a member of the seduction community. Do I count? Does my married ex-wingman count? Does Clarisse’s dad who’s read a David DeAngelo book count? Does Guestina—a woman posting in this thread who has applied pickup knowledge—count? Does Chris himself count?

    On Chris’ old site where this article was posted, he talked more positively about the seduction community in his old articles. Specifically, he mentioned how much it had helped him, even though he felt that he has now moved past it.

    Chris criticizing the seduction community is a lot like modern psychology criticizing Freud and Skinner. Although the modern thinkers have the more correct paradigm, and they of course have valid criticisms of the older theory… the new theory wouldn’t be possible without standing on the shoulders of what came before.

    Chris has an excellent website for teaching social skills, but without the seduction community, I doubt he would have gotten good enough at social skills to even be making the website, and critiquing the community (or at least, he wouldn’t have gotten there so quickly).

    Chris, and any reader with seduction community background, will know that he had a major debt to the community. However, a reader outside the community who doesn’t understand that context, and who hasn’t read his other writing describing the positive things he got from the seduction community, might get a skewed idea of the seduction community from reading this essay out of context.
54. 

    Hugh Ristik April 23, 2011 at 5:19 am #

    Mark, I’ve enjoyed your comments.

    This is actually backwards. The “have sex with every girl you meet” meme is a marketing trick and really only peddled by the most successful or commercial PUA’s. The VAST and silent majority of the market is merely interested in getting a date, getting a girlfriend, etc., etc.

    Yes. If we defined PUAs as “men who self-identify as PUAs, post on PUA forums, and are into the PUA scene,” maybe Clarisse’s theory would be correct. That population might have a high rate of men who are interested in social power games in and of themselves themselves.

    However, if we look at the population of men who have applied any sort of pickup knowledge, and men who are “graduates” of pickup like Chris or myself, that population is probably different, and more interested in simply going on dates and having girlfriends.

    I like how you refer to the “silent majority.” My view is that the majority of men with pickup knowledge are silent about it, and the guys who write about it on PUA forums and hang out in lairs are disproportionately ideological, unhealthy, and fanatical about it.

    Furthermore, I’ve always argued that even what guys write on PUA forums doesn’t necessarily accurately portray their true attitudes towards women. Would you agree? I’m often frustrated when people go read PUA forums that think that they can know read the thoughts of every guy who studies pickup.

    Re: “I have a boyfriend,” this is one of those things that it depends on how and when it’s said. But generally speaking, even if I think a girl is lying and just using this to screen me, I’m about 99% likely to ditch her on the spot. It’s fickle and dishonest and ultimately ineffective for the reason Clarisse mentioned.

    I think this sort of screening is very important. Pickup often encourages us to tear down our expectations of women, because many of us begin with overly idealistic ideas about women and dating. However, there comes a time in growth where it is necessary for us to decide what behavioral standards are important to us, and realistic for us to require.

    Again, this is kind of the way it’s all presented, but it almost never plays out this way. Market surveys done by myself, other coaches and large forums find a few things consistently:
    - Something like 60% of the guys who read this stuff only read it to address one very specific problem (i.e., how to ask the cute girl in class for her number, etc.)
    - Like 80% of the guys, once they experience some success (they get laid a couple times, they get a girlfriend), they’re never heard from again.
    The marketing is laid out like that because that casts the widest net. Whether you want to get a date with a girl you know, or whether you want to fuck 1000 girls, if I tell you I can help you get “ANY GIRL” then both of you will buy.
    The point I’m making I guess, is don’t mistake the marketing message of a minority of the companies, with the intentions and motivations of 80% of the actual guys out doing this stuff. That’s all I’m saying.

    Very interesting. I’ve long suspected the same thing. It’s notable that so many guys just drop out of the community once they learn to deal with something they were having trouble with. Since they drop out, we don’t learn their perspectives… instead, the guys who write on pickup forums and hang out in lairs are the more troubled and fanatical.

    Judging the seduction community by the guys who presently post on pickup forums is like judging the discipline of therapy by current patients. You might think, “wow, therapy sucks… all the folks doing therapy are messed up!” But that’s not a fair assessment, because once people make improvements, they often leave therapy because they don’t need it anymore. You can’t just look at the present patients to assess the discipline, you have to look at the past patients, too.
55. 

    Infra April 23, 2011 at 6:13 am #

    @Hugh:

    The therapy metaphor is one that I find problematic, along with the idea of “graduating” from the community, because one of the things that can result from that is a compounding of stigma: on top of that associated with needing the advice in the first place, it places the additional one of evidently not having been able to find a fix (because if they had, they wouldn’t need to be there anymore). To acknowledge that people leave after finding what they were looking for is one thing, but to frame this as therapy tends to frame the people who remain as seriously troubled, even if they aren’t, and those who haven’t “graduated” as not having the mettle to succeed, even if their continued association is by choice; mix that in with the initial shame, and you’ve got quite a cocktail on your hands.

    Given that, it isn’t all that surprising that the community would take on polarized attitudes.
56. 

    AB April 23, 2011 at 9:09 am #

    @Sagredo:

    AB, I don’t mind similar behaviour assigned to a similarity in gender. But there is a toxic line of thought that runs men and women are the same except for social effects, so when they behave differently, the male behaviour is wrong.

    That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that female behaviour is criticised all the time, including (perhaps especially) by feminists, but every time the same happens to men, people resort to the old cliché about men not being allowed to be men, as if improving themselves is some betrayal of who they are as a sex.

    One of the things I’m seeing underlying criticism of PUA coming from feminist directions is a failure to appreciate the nature of male desire.

    Definitely. And this is in sharp contrast to how female desire is accepted. For instance, I mentioned that, unlike the lucky guys who only have to put up with potentially rude rejections if they hit on someone in a bar, I don’t even go to bars unless I’m with friends, because I suspect (due to plenty of men telling me so) that to a large part of the men in the bar, I’m not welcome. You see, I get turned off when I can’t relax, so I’m unable to perform sexually on command, meaning that I can’t just have sex with random guys I meet (unless I’m prepared for a world of pain).

    But if I’m in a bar, I might end up talking to a guy. And perhaps he’ll like talking and flirting just for its own sake (I know guys who do), but perhaps he’s going to expect sexual services in exchange for deigning to spend time with me, and ‘leading him on’ without being prepared to service him sexually means that he’s wasted his time talking to me! Disaster! As a guy told me, with a very straight face “one of the things guys are most worried about is teases”, with a look that told me just how high a priority he considered the need for men to not have to socialise with women without sex being involved to be (btw, the Danish word for tease translates into ‘trick-cunt’, just to give you an idea about how much the frequent female need to socialise without a promise of sex is respected).

    I’ve brought it up here before that I’ve so far been unable to get sexually aroused in situations where I’ve felt that sex was a requirement, and that I need it to be something which occurs spontaneously because all the involved parties want it. And that as long as I can’t talk to men for its own sake, with sex being a remote possibility but not a requirement, the bar-scene (as well as several other scenes) is closed to me, because me exploring my sexuality in that way makes me a tease. And I know that there are enough men who don’t feel I have the right to frequent bars with the goal of just talking to people that I don’t feel comfortable doing so. To me, this is pretty much men telling me, and the millions of women who feel this way, that our sexuality is not OK.

    And when I’ve brought up here, it has pretty much been ignored in favour of “But you don’t get how hard it is to be a man and not have your sexuality accepted!”. Because, as men seem to have decided by themselves, it’s male desire that’s not appreciated. And I see this acceptance of my desire every time I hear my sex lovingly described as gatekeepers of male sexuality. And every time a guy reacts to my statements about how I don’t feel there’s any acceptance or tolerance towards my sexuality by either ignoring it or give me the equivalent of “But real issue here is that, with you not feeling comfortable or welcome to explore your own sexuality, I could end up not getting a piece of your pussy!”

    It’s so great to a woman and not only have worse sex than men, feel more sexually repressed, know that your sexuality is more likely to be labelled disgusting if you’re not attractive yourself, and risk being called either a cheap slut or a frigid prude, but also be made to feel guilty every time those feelings prevent you from giving sex to men, and have it taken as a sign that you don’t appreciate male sexuality the way you ought to. I can just feel the appreciation for my sexuality when I hear these things.

    It’s actually not helpful to judge male sexuality against a norm of female sexuality. For instance, desire generally is partly desire of a body. But if there’s too much focus on the body, as measured against this norm, it’s castigated as “objectifying”. We need to recognise this as a personal preference and not an ethical statement.

    It’s also not helpful to judge female sexuality on the basis of male perceptions of themselves as being above being judged on their looks (unless they’re gay of course). The vast majority of guys who’re sexually unsuccessful would not be so if they looked better. In fact, I have never seen a guy whom I’ve judged to be very physically attractive who’ve had trouble getting dates. And yet, physically unattractive guys keep on not just drooling over girls vastly more attractive than themselves, but also insisting that the only reason said girls are not interested on them is because women don’t like nice guys, neatly shifting the whole blame on women, while simultaneously claiming to be the victims of a society that doesn’t accept or appreciate male sexuality.

    And it’s even more helpful to judge female reactions against the norm of female experiences, not the norm of male (hetero)sexuality (which tends to be the norm wherever women are concerned). For instance, it’s very common for men to see women almost purely in terms of male sexuality, even in contexts that aren’t sexual for women. As a geek, I can tell that it’s not uncommon for female roleplayers to spend time searching for pictures to illustrate their characters that aren’t meant to double as pin-ups. Because, while male characters can be fat, skinny, young, old, pretty, ugly, human looking, inhuman looking, heavily armoured, half naked, and everything in between, the majority of female characters are portrayed as nearly identical looking young women in bikinis, because their only important character trait is being sexy.

    This works for guys for whom ‘female’ is a character trait on par with ‘thrill-seeking’, ‘wise’, ‘tough, or ‘grumpy’, but for quite a few of us female geeks who like it when our characters are actually, well, characters, it presents a problem. That problem is amplified when looking at fiction in general, where the dominance of male sexuality has caused female actors to be out of jobs (since many female roles are just there to fill a hotness-quota or represent the obligatory love-interest), because a good deal of the male population has little interest in stories about women that isn’t linked to male sexuality.

    And you’re right that in a heartless, cynical, capitalist society, men have all the right in the world to use their considerable buying power to dissuade the portrayal of women in capacities unrelated to male sexuality. But in such a heartless and cynical world, feminists can’t be expected to take any responsibility for whether or not those men feel good about themselves doing it either.

    Actually, it helps to look at gay men to get an idea of how many het men would prefer to behave if they could. A bathhouse providing endless availability of semi-anonymous heterosex would be very popular with men (some) if women were into it. Those men are not wrong to want that, just as women are not wrong to not want that.

    Gay men often have a lot of the right ideas compared to straight men, which s probably why so many women like them. But I’m reluctant to base my evaluations of gay sexuality on myths and stereotypes from the 80s. There are plenty of heterosexual men and women who seek out swinger-clubs and other places to have noncommittal sex, but they’re not taken as representative of their whole sexuality. Many gay men live in monogamous relationships and just wish to get married, which lots of the same type of men who moon about the lack of acceptance of malehood are eager to deny them.

    Once one accepts that men and women have different kinds of desires, both as genders and as individuals, and that both are entitled to their desires even if not to any particular outcome, we can then figure out what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour.

    Once heterosexual men start realising how often they get to set themselves up as the norm, they might be a little more understanding how much their insistence of making their sexuality the point of all gendered interactions is affecting everybody else.
57. 

    nathan April 23, 2011 at 12:03 pm #

    “For instance, it’s very common for men to see women almost purely in terms of male sexuality, even in contexts that aren’t sexual for women.” Perhaps, or perhaps this is the story we’ve been culturally fed about men.

    “The vast majority of guys who’re sexually unsuccessful would not be so if they looked better.” This is entirely too simplistic in my view. There are so many other factors – like wealth, social status, where someone lives, friendship circles, level of connection or disconnection from groups in one’s community – that play into it. Once you get past those who totally fit stereotypical views of beauty and attractiveness, how you look is only one part of the attraction puzzle. The extremes stand out – the totally “hot” men and women have little trouble picking people up, and those deemed totally “ugly” mostly struggle. But the vast majority of us lie somewhere in between, where all those other factors play out.

    In fact, my own “success” in terms of my relationship history has often been tied to how connected I am with a larger set of groups, be it friendship circles or other communities I am in. When I’m more isolated, there’s more of a need to rely on skills that don’t come as naturally to me because I’m dealing with strangers or relative strangers.

    “I’ve brought it up here before that I’ve so far been unable to get sexually aroused in situations where I’ve felt that sex was a requirement, and that I need it to be something which occurs spontaneously because all the involved parties want it.” Although it may not be apparent, some men feel the same way. The times I have felt it expected that I have sex always felt forced and unpleasant. And I have even noticed that times when I, myself, have been too expectant of sex end up not working. Whatever natural arousal and connection is there ends up getting shunted into what’s coming next, which spoils the whole thing.

    This whole male/female desire conversation also feels simplistic to me. While there may be some differences we can point to if everything was mapped out on a scale – I think it’s also the case that more and more men and women fall outside of “a norm” these days. So, when I hear someone speak about “male desire,” I think “what is that exactly?” The same can be said about “female desire.” These conversations seem to get bogged down by adherence to a gender binary that is crumbling to some degree, but also never really existed anyway. Even in the most “traditional, patriarchal” settings, there are still people who don’t “fit” and who choose to be at least somewhat open about that not fitting, even if they are completely shamed and ostracized for it.

    So, while I would agree that women experience much more policing around their sexuality, and also deal with more unwanted invasions and expectations – it’s also the case that men who deviate from the norm face a whole set of different challenges, which may be lesser in degree to what women face, but which represent – in my view – another piece of the whole puzzle.

    “Once heterosexual men start realising how often they get to set themselves up as the norm, they might be a little more understanding how much their insistence of making their sexuality the point of all gendered interactions is affecting everybody else.” When I see a statement like this I think “Not only do I have to deal with all the men out there who reinforce this, but I also have to face the fact that a percentage of women will view me – solely due to my gender and sexual preference – as part of that group.”

    Women are rightly pissed that they often get reduced to sex objects. But you know, as a man, I get pissed at so often being reduced to “a sex hound who is solely driven by his cock.”

    These totalizing views are so tired and worn out.
    And sometimes it just seems like a big loop where the behaviors and thoughts most of talking here don’t want get reinforced anyway because we’d rather keep it abstract and assign blame, then actually question our assumptions, share experiences, and consider how things might be different.
58. 

    AB April 23, 2011 at 1:56 pm #

    @nathan:

    Perhaps, or perhaps this is the story we’ve been culturally fed about men.

    No, it’s common. Doesn’t mean all men subscribe to it, but it’s quite common.

    This is entirely too simplistic in my view. There are so many other factors – like wealth, social status, where someone lives, friendship circles, level of connection or disconnection from groups in one’s community – that play into it. Once you get past those who totally fit stereotypical views of beauty and attractiveness, how you look is only one part of the attraction puzzle.

    Of course, but then again, the same holds true for women. That doesn’t mean that going from the unattractive to the good looking category wouldn’t be enough to make the difference for a lot of the guys who think their lack of sexual success is related to their niceness or their lack of PUA skills.

    Although it may not be apparent, some men feel the same way. The times I have felt it expected that I have sex always felt forced and unpleasant. And I have even noticed that times when I, myself, have been too expectant of sex end up not working. Whatever natural arousal and connection is there ends up getting shunted into what’s coming next, which spoils the whole thing.

    I don’t doubt some men feel the same way, just as there are women who can have sex on command and not be worse of because of it. But I have yet to hear a guy worry that by interacting with a girl, he’s obliging himself to ave sex with her, and that she’ll feel cheated by having spent time with him without getting sex in return. And the girls who want sex with a guy and don’t get it tend to (in my experience) either be intrigued or worry more about if something was wrong with them.

    These conversations seem to get bogged down by adherence to a gender binary that is crumbling to some degree, but also never really existed anyway. Even in the most “traditional, patriarchal” settings, there are still people who don’t “fit” and who choose to be at least somewhat open about that not fitting, even if they are completely shamed and ostracized for it.

    So, while I would agree that women experience much more policing around their sexuality, and also deal with more unwanted invasions and expectations – it’s also the case that men who deviate from the norm face a whole set of different challenges, which may be lesser in degree to what women face, but which represent – in my view – another piece of the whole puzzle.

    But what we’re talking about here is that stereotypical male sexuality is not appreciated enough, which I think is strange considering how many people struggle just to get their sexuality acknowledged, let alone appreciated. The last comment to Clarisse’s Creep article, was from a guy with a website called ‘The Sex Nerd’, which is a very general description. The headline says “The best sex-oriented free blog around, with sex questions, porn reviews, sex commentary and inside industry information! You like sex? You need . . . the Sex Nerd!”. It sounds very universal, basically for everyone interested in sex, and yet, all the material is aimed at straight men.

    Of the five categories on the page, there is “How to tell your wife about your porn hobby”, “Nerd girl hall of fame” (which seems to be mainly about conventionally attractive women who play nerds in TV shows), and three categories talking about what seems to be male-focussed porn. So it’s the best sex-oriented blog, which people who like sex need, and all the material pretty much assumes that ‘people’ are straight men of conventional taste. And even in sex-positive spaces, the same view prevails. A couple of months ago, maymay had a post up remarking how even the flyers for lady porn day largely featured attractive white women, as if women wouldn’t be interested in looking at men.

    It’s not just that, but it’s what I see almost everywhere I look. Sex is equated with conventionally attractive women trying to arouse straight men on such a routine basis that it’s not even noticed most of the time. It makes it damned arrogant when the same men start talking about how marginalised their sexuality is, and how everybody needs to move even further to make more room for their sexuality.

    When I see a statement like this I think “Not only do I have to deal with all the men out there who reinforce this, but I also have to face the fact that a percentage of women will view me – solely due to my gender and sexual preference – as part of that group.”

    Women are rightly pissed that they often get reduced to sex objects. But you know, as a man, I get pissed at so often being reduced to “a sex hound who is solely driven by his cock.”

    Sort of like how women have to not only fight to get their sexuality acknowledged, but also have to deal with accusations of prudery and not respecting masculinity every time their wishes and priorities aren’t aligned with stereotypical male sexuality, and take the collective blame for every time some woman somewhere fails to fuck some guy who think she owes it to him.

    I get it, and I’m sorry I chose a simplified model of explanation, but I was responding to a post dealing with stereotypical male sexuality, and stereotypical female sexuality as perceived by the men who subscribe to stereotypical male sexuality, so I went along with those definitions because the post was getting long enough as it was.

    These totalizing views are so tired and worn out.
    And sometimes it just seems like a big loop where the behaviors and thoughts most of talking here don’t want get reinforced anyway because we’d rather keep it abstract and assign blame, then actually question our assumptions, share experiences, and consider how things might be different.

    But blame can be important, if nothing else then for establishing who’s trying to assign it.
59. 

    Sam April 23, 2011 at 2:30 pm #

    AB,

    really, remember when you called me patronizing? Kind of ironic given that you keep telling people how their perception of reality is just wrong and should really be more like yours.

    I’m not sure why you don’t just say what you seem to imply over and over: that men talking about their problems with women, even in as fair and balanced a manner as here, is “entitled” and ignorant of what’s really important, and they should really get a grip and check their privilege (ie, “shut up”).

    If they just looked better, they’d get laid alright. Thanks for summarizing the entire masculinity debate in such a concise paradigm… (I know sarcasm doesn’t work on the web, but, well, I tried anyway.)

    “And you’re right that in a heartless, cynical, capitalist society, men have all the right in the world to use their considerable buying power to dissuade the portrayal of women in capacities unrelated to male sexuality. But in such a heartless and cynical world, feminists can’t be expected to take any responsibility for whether or not those men feel good about themselves doing it either.”

    And once again we’re at a point where *you* question the entire purpose of talking to each other. So, let’s just go to our respective corners of the battle of the sexes? I mean I don’t understand what the point of basically insulting people who are trying to talk to (general you) you is. This entire debate is premised on the mutual acceptance of problems and the assumption that there is a way to both reconfigure currently conflicting interests as not actually confliciting, and – where a reconfiguration is impossible – that they can largely be balanced in a mutually acceptable way.

    You don’t seem to share that assumption – do you?

    Sadly, for all the comments you’ve written, and all the discussion held, your position seems to not have moved even a millimeter – male problems don’t really seem exist, and if they do, they’re not worthy of attention. You’re expecting people to consider (general you) your problems while telling them that it is fair and well to not consider theirs. Really?

    Telling people it is their moral duty to suffer while helping someone else is probably not going to be a particularly convincing position…
60. 

    Clarisse April 23, 2011 at 3:48 pm #

    Correcting a misconception: Chris, who wrote the original article, actually asked me to change the intro blurb after reading my original version. The current version reflects how he prefers to be described. He also wrote to me that

    I wouldn’t say I used ‘some pickup artist principles to create’ my other site [i.e. SucceedSocially.com]. The other site came first and I can honestly say I didn’t once consider anything from the seduction community when I was coming up with it. It wasn’t a reaction to the seduction community at all. Completely separate topic.
61. 

    AB April 23, 2011 at 3:51 pm #

    @Sam:

    you keep telling people how their perception of reality is just wrong and should really be more like yours.

    When I think a view is wrong, I’ll say it. It’s not like anyone here have held themselves back in saying when they thought I was wrong, and I’m not going to hold myself to higher standards just because I’m one of the few people here with a vagina.

    I’m not sure why you don’t just say what you seem to imply over and over: that men talking about their problems with women, even in as fair and balanced a manner as here, is “entitled” and ignorant of what’s really important, and they should really get a grip and check their privilege (ie, “shut up”).

    Way to go proving how I’m the arrogant one, assuming that, for all my bluntness, there’s some real opinion of mine that I’m just not sharing. And for all that I’ve mentioned repeatedly how tired I am of being put into some feminist context that I’m not part of, you have to insinuate some feminist agenda behind it too. And way to go teaching me to not disrespect other people’s perceptions.

    If they just looked better, they’d get laid alright. Thanks for summarizing the entire masculinity debate in such a concise paradigm… (I know sarcasm doesn’t work on the web, but, well, I tried anyway.)

    It’s not the entire debate, but it’s a big part of it, which men keep wanting to avoid at the same time as they’re defending their right to be attracted to women based on appearance.

    And once again we’re at a point where *you* question the entire purpose of talking to each other. So, let’s just go to our respective corners of the battle of the sexes? I mean I don’t understand what the point of basically insulting people who are trying to talk to (general you) you is.

    So now your perception of me being insulting is valid, but my perception of people being insulting is not? If that’s talking, I don’t want to listen.

    This entire debate is premised on the mutual acceptance of problems and the assumption that there is a way to both reconfigure currently conflicting interests as not actually confliciting, and – where a reconfiguration is impossible – that they can largely be balanced in a mutually acceptable way.

    You don’t seem to share that assumption – do you?

    If accepting other people’s problems meant just ignoring them and keep focussing on my own, while expressing disapproval that everybody else isn’t sharing my focus, then I don’t share that assumption, I think it’s a shitty thing to do, and I’d prefer to be without your acceptance.

    Sadly, for all the comments you’ve written, and all the discussion held, your position seems to not have moved even a millimeter – male problems don’t really seem exist, and if they do, they’re not worthy of attention. You’re expecting people to consider (general you) your problems while telling them that it is fair and well to not consider theirs. Really?

    It’s ironic that whenever I’ve expressed a problem of mine as being linked with the issues expressed here (e.g. a lack of girls to talk to in bars compared to girls staying away because the sexual environment is unwelcoming to them, or female sexual scarcity compared to girls feeling that they need sexual value to make up for a lack of regard in nonsexual contexts), the answers (when there have been answers) have pretty consistently been “Yeah it sucks for both sexes. Now in regards to how masculinity is vilified and male sexuality is not appreciated enough……”, and then the discussion continues with men talking with men about how hard it is to be a man.

    So far, you have not been interested in addressing any of my concerns. I make a post saying that , however men might feel about their chances picking up women in bars, at least my male friends can go to a bar without feeling that their mere presence is an offence to the opposite sex, and you respond by ignoring it and continue to talk about how bad female sexual scarcity is for men. Sagredo makes a post suggesting that women’s behaviour is never criticised, and you completely ignore it in favour of telling me to take other people’s concerns seriously. You talk about how a a misogynist webcomic is funny, and then turn around start lecturing me about not insulting people. I get the feeling your real problem isn’t so much any degree of offence, disregard for other people’s opinions, absolutist statements about the sexes, or whatever else, but just that I don’t agree with you.
62. 

    Clarisse April 23, 2011 at 4:56 pm #

    Okay okay ….

    I agree with AB that it can get frustrating to feel as though women’s side is being ignored in these conversations. And I think it’s really not cool for men to try and co-opt every conversation ever about sexuality (hence the “what about the menz?” sarcastic feminist note), but the general focus of these threads is, in fairness, masculinity, and communities that are focused on men’s desires, so it makes sense for masculinity and male desire to be the main topic.

    I relate really strongly to AB’s critiques, and I agree with her on a lot of what she says, especially comments like:

    It’s not just that, but it’s what I see almost everywhere I look. Sex is equated with conventionally attractive women trying to arouse straight men on such a routine basis that it’s not even noticed most of the time. It makes it damned arrogant when the same men start talking about how marginalised their sexuality is, and how everybody needs to move even further to make more room for their sexuality.

    and

    Because, as men seem to have decided by themselves, it’s male desire that’s not appreciated. And I see this acceptance of my desire every time I hear my sex lovingly described as gatekeepers of male sexuality. And every time a guy reacts to my statements about how I don’t feel there’s any acceptance or tolerance towards my sexuality by either ignoring it or give me the equivalent of “But real issue here is that, with you not feeling comfortable or welcome to explore your own sexuality, I could end up not getting a piece of your pussy!”

    It’s so great to a woman and not only have worse sex than men, feel more sexually repressed, know that your sexuality is more likely to be labelled disgusting if you’re not attractive yourself, and risk being called either a cheap slut or a frigid prude, but also be made to feel guilty every time those feelings prevent you from giving sex to men, and have it taken as a sign that you don’t appreciate male sexuality the way you ought to. I can just feel the appreciation for my sexuality when I hear these things.

    I want there to be a way to ensure that those critiques are on the table when we do talk about men’s sexuality, and male sexual desire, because I think it’s important that heterosexual men who are trying to have sex (especially guys who are into manipulative disciplines like PUA) keep women’s reality in mind. And for the most part, I think commenters here are trying to contribute ideas and learn about what other people’s experiences.

    But I don’t want the conversation to become oppression olympics, or a snipe-fest, and lose focus on actually making each other aware of our own realities. And AB, I do think that you’re framing those critiques very aggressively.

    Here are some suggestions?

    When making assertions about a group you aren’t part of (e.g., men making assertions about women), try saying “I have observed that women seem to be …” rather than “Women are …” Providing evidence, even if it’s anecdotal, would be awesome.

    When trying to describe a problem for your group (e.g., women talking about how much things suck for women), try thinking about how that problem might negatively affect the other side as well, and including some kind of musings along those lines before posting.

    Please try to assume that other people in the conversation mean well and aren’t deliberately ignoring or marginalizing your perspective.

    Also, in general, framing things as “I feel like” or “I think” will usually come off better than “You’re saying” or “you think”. Although some people still manage to sound like jerks while doing this, I’m not sure how ….
63. 

    Hugh Ristik April 23, 2011 at 6:12 pm #

    AB, I’m a bit confused. These threads on Clarisse’s blog have mainly been about masculinity and pickup. So is it any surprise that men’s dating challenges and experiences are being centered? Discussing female challenges in society and dating wouldn’t be off-topic, of course, but if they aren’t the main topic, then maybe it isn’t surprising that people aren’t addressing some of the points you bring up.

    The space that Clarisse has created is unique, in that it allows for the dating challenges of men to be discussed in a non-stigmatizing way, but also without the constant ranting about women that you might find on MRA or PUA blogs. It’s not surprising that men on this blog are primarily using it to discuss their own experiences with gender and sexuality. This doesn’t mean that they don’t agree that at least some of your points are valid.

    If you feel that someone has just actively denied your experience (as opposed to disagreeing with your interpretation of it, or presenting their differing experience), then that’s different, but that’s not my initial impression of what’s been happening. Personally, I often read your discussions of your experiences with the challenges that women face, I agree with most of what you say, disagree with other things, and then respond to something else.

    If Clarisse started a thread on femininity, female pickup, or female dating challenges, then perhaps discussions would look different.

    I’m going to do another post and explain what I think about the points and experiences that you raised.
64. 

    Hugh Ristik April 23, 2011 at 6:15 pm #

    AB, here is what I think of some of the points you raised in those posts in this thread:

    Sagredo said:

    AB, I don’t mind similar behaviour assigned to a similarity in gender. But there is a toxic line of thought that runs men and women are the same except for social effects, so when they behave differently, the male behaviour is wrong.

    AB said:

    That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that female behaviour is criticised all the time, including (perhaps especially) by feminists, but every time the same happens to men, people resort to the old cliché about men not being allowed to be men, as if improving themselves is some betrayal of who they are as a sex.

    Without you presenting more of your reasoning about why you disagree with Sagredo, it looks like you are dismissing him.

    Now, I agree with you that the “men not being allowed to be men” meme is B.S. I don’t agree with Strauss bringing it up in his interview. I think his point was about women trying to change men in relationships. In that case, his real beef is with people trying to change their partners. If he believes that women do this more often, then he should complain about women trying to turn men into projects, rather than women “not allowing men to be men.”

    Sagredo said:

    One of the things I’m seeing underlying criticism of PUA coming from feminist directions is a failure to appreciate the nature of male desire.

    AB said:

    Definitely. And this is in sharp contrast to how female desire is accepted.

    Thanks for acknowledging how male desire is often not accepted.

    For instance, I mentioned that, unlike the lucky guys who only have to put up with potentially rude rejections if they hit on someone in a bar

    I think you’re actually making a good point, here. It’s a lot easier for a guy to go to a bar and not be bothered by advances from people they probably aren’t attracted to who may have presumptuous expectations.

    But if I’m in a bar, I might end up talking to a guy. And perhaps he’ll like talking and flirting just for its own sake (I know guys who do), but perhaps he’s going to expect sexual services in exchange for deigning to spend time with me, and ‘leading him on’ without being prepared to service him sexually means that he’s wasted his time talking to me!

    The attitude that these men seem to hold sounds pretty ridiculous. Expecting women in a bar to hookup that night to avoid being considered teases is not realistic. In fact, expecting women to hookup at all to not be considered teases is not realistic.

    It does seem that a lot of men go to bars looking for someone to have some sort of sexual activity with. That’s a reasonable desire, but it’s also reasonable for people to want to socialize in bars without hooking up with anyone. To balance these two, desires, I would suggest that if you’re sure you aren’t interested in a guy, it might be a good idea to engage in certain behaviors that are commonly used by other women to display sexual interest (e.g. sitting in his lap). This could indeed provide a jarring surprise when you reject him later.

    However, if you aren’t sure that aren’t into the guy, then he is basically getting an audition if you talk to him. Even from a purely pragmatic, sex-focused standpoint, it would be silly for him to call you a “tease” when you gave him an audition, and he simply failed to make the cut. Expecting a woman to know from the beginning whether she is interested or not would be a bad practice, especially since women’s preferences are more particular about behavior and personality than men’s, and those traits are hard to assess.

    If you are sure you aren’t into a guy, and you aren’t excessively flirting with him (e.g. you aren’t sitting in his lap, rubbing your breasts on his chest, or telling him about your favorite sexual positions), then I would say that he doesn’t have any basis to criticize you for being a bar, and if he does, he should go to hell.

    As a guy told me, with a very straight face “one of the things guys are most worried about is teases”, with a look that told me just how high a priority he considered the need for men to not have to socialise with women without sex being involved to be

    This guy is a jerk. I think most guys in this thread would agree. In fact, perhaps the considered it so obvious that they don’t feel a need to express their agreement.

    “Don’t give me an audition unless you are sure that you already want me” is an absurd attitude for men to hold. I am angry that some men hold it, because it hurts me, too, if women are more hesitant to be social with me out of fear of being considered “teases.”

    Btw, the reason that I have a skeptical attitude towards the “leading on” construct is because of studying pickup. Before then, I used to worry about being led on.

    I’ve brought it up here before that I’ve so far been unable to get sexually aroused in situations where I’ve felt that sex was a requirement, and that I need it to be something which occurs spontaneously because all the involved parties want it.

    Completely understandable preference.

    And that as long as I can’t talk to men for its own sake, with sex being a remote possibility but not a requirement

    In my view, there is nothing wrong with you talking to men in bars for its own sake, with sex a remote possibility but not a requirement. Guys should just deal with the fact that women are more sexually and behaviorally selective, and may take a longer time to assess men. Furthermore, if they got an audition and failed to meet your criteria, then they shouldn’t get mad at you or at themselves.

    the bar-scene (as well as several other scenes) is closed to me, because me exploring my sexuality in that way makes me a tease.

    In my view, the only valid application of “tease” is when someone is showing behaviors associated with sexual interest significantly in excess of what they feel at the time they are showing those behaviors.

    And I know that there are enough men who don’t feel I have the right to frequent bars with the goal of just talking to people that I don’t feel comfortable doing so.

    Well, they are wrong, and they are making the bar scene less fun for everyone, including themselves. Even in the context of their sexual goals, they are shooting themselves in the foot by scaring off women who may give them sexual opportunities, but who are just more selective.

    Because, as men seem to have decided by themselves, it’s male desire that’s not appreciated.

    Wait, which men are you talking about? I think that most of the men here feel that both male and female sexuality encounter lack of appreciation, in different contexts. These threads just happen to mostly focused on lack of appreciation towards male sexuality.

    And every time a guy reacts to my statements about how I don’t feel there’s any acceptance or tolerance towards my sexuality by either ignoring it or give me the equivalent of “But real issue here is that, with you not feeling comfortable or welcome to explore your own sexuality, I could end up not getting a piece of your pussy!”

    Can’t it be both? Couldn’t there be oppression both towards women who don’t feel uncomfortable expressing their sexuality, and towards men who then missing on women exploring their sexuality with them? I haven’t seen men here saying anything contradicting this interpretation.

    It’s so great to a woman and not only have worse sex than men

    Now you are going somewhere I’m not willing to follow you. Saying that women have worse sex than men isn’t just a claim about women’s experience, it’s also a claim about men’s. It’s possible that you are correct, but I’m not going to accept assertions like this as a condition for discussion, nor am I marginalizing your experience if I’m skeptical of this claim.

    If you instead claimed that women have less orgasms during sex, then I would agree. That’s measurable.

    feel more sexually repressed

    Because you know how sexually repressed men feel. Pardon me for not getting on board with this sort of oppression olympics. If you wanted to present this as a hypothesis, then I would be open to it, but I’m not OK with you just asserting it.

    know that your sexuality is more likely to be labelled disgusting if you’re not attractive yourself

    I’m a lot more sympathetic to this claim, because it’s more measurable. There is evidence that women are judged more on their appearance.

    and risk being called either a cheap slut or a frigid prude

    I am sympathetic towards the existence of this double standard.

    The vast majority of guys who’re sexually unsuccessful would not be so if they looked better. In fact, I have never seen a guy whom I’ve judged to be very physically attractive who’ve had trouble getting dates.

    Well, my experience differs. Guys in the top 10% of attractiveness seem to do quite well, but short of that, being above-average in looks is no guarantee of dating success.

    In my case, even when I was terrible with women, I would get attention purely based on my looks sometimes. However, this attention evaporated once women attempted to have a conversation with me, probably because my social skills were so bad. I improved my dating success a lot by improving my style and grooming, but I’m still quite confident that I would still have major problems in dating if I hadn’t also changed my behavior.

    And yet, physically unattractive guys keep on not just drooling over girls vastly more attractive than themselves, but also insisting that the only reason said girls are not interested on them is because women don’t like nice guys, neatly shifting the whole blame on women, while simultaneously claiming to be the victims of a society that doesn’t accept or appreciate male sexuality.

    These guys are confused. But I hope you realize that plenty of men can make the same complaints without aiming for women who are vastly more conventionally attractive.

    Gotta run now… more later…
65. 

    Clarisse April 23, 2011 at 6:40 pm #

    To lighten the tone, here is a COMPLETELY BRILLIANT AND HILARIOUS post from Mark:

    http://www.practicalpickup.com/the-10-step-guide-to-getting-hb10s-every-time

    it’s not going to be funny to people who are generally unfamiliar with pickup though.
66. 

    Sam April 23, 2011 at 11:29 pm #

    Clarisse,

    that post by Mark made me think of the Lorenzo von Matterhorn…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7ZVEvxSR7g

    Should also lighten mood a little ;)

    AB,

    It’s not the entire debate, but it’s a big part of it, which men keep wanting to avoid at the same time as they’re defending their right to be attracted to women based on appearance.

    I’m sorry, but that’s basically the same argument that was once made by a crazy American pundit about how “feminism was created to integrate ugly women into society”.

    If accepting other people’s problems meant just ignoring them and keep focussing on my own, while expressing disapproval that everybody else isn’t sharing my focus, then I don’t share that assumption

    That’s your perception? You know what’s weird? That sentence is pretty much a shorter version of my comment directed at you. I really don’t understand how it’s possible to talk past each other to that extent.

    I get the feeling your real problem isn’t so much any degree of offence, disregard for other people’s opinions, absolutist statements about the sexes, or whatever else, but just that I don’t agree with you.

    I think my problem is mostly the way you say things. If you’ve ever said “it sucks for both sexes”, I’ve missed it (which, on is entirely possible).

    Clarisse, AB,

    as for the aspects you want on the table -

    It’s not just that, but it’s what I see almost everywhere I look. Sex is equated with conventionally attractive women trying to arouse straight men on such a routine basis that it’s not even noticed most of the time. It makes it damned arrogant when the same men start talking about how marginalised their sexuality is, and how everybody needs to move even further to make more room for their sexuality.

    But really, how is this not a rephrasing of “check your privilege”? How is this not a rephrasing of “how entitled is it if heterosexual men talk about problems when the entire world is built around their sexuality?” How is it possible to make an argument about how privileges aren’t even noticed by those holding them without being willing to accept that oneself could be the bearer of privileges one is equally unaware of? How is that paragraph not a slippery slope into oppression olympics?
    I would also like to mention that the kind of pain we’re talking about is partly strucuturally caused, but *individually* experienced.

    …“But real issue here is that, with you not feeling comfortable or welcome to explore your own sexuality, I could end up not getting a piece of your pussy!””

    Not really the point as such, in my opinion. But the imbalance that results is an important social variable. I strongly believe that reducing the imbalance in perceived sexual scarcity is one of the most important variables when it comes to improving society. I believe that giving men better tools to deal with the scarcity they perceive in appropriate ways will help in that respect just as reducing slut shaming will.
67. 

    Lathe of Heaven April 24, 2011 at 12:03 am #

    .
    “Sex is equated with conventionally attractive women trying to arouse straight men on such a routine basis that it’s not even noticed most of the time.”
    .
    Good lord, on what planet is this true? and, how can I get a ticket there?
    .
    If the phrase “straight men” were replaced with “the top 5-10% most attractive straight men” then this sentence would have a chance of passing the laugh test. But the idea that conventionally attractive women are trying to arouse all straight men, or a majority of straight men, is utterly ridiculous.
    .
    Once again, I highly recommend this Alek Novy post:
    .
    http://aleknovy.com/2009/11/04/the-hierarchy-most-men-are-at-the-bottom/
    .
    it will, literally, help put things in perspective; which is that (i) the average man’s sexuality is utterly marginalized, (ii) women don’t realize it, (iii) feminists can’t be bothered to care and probably even revel in the idea.
    .
    There’s an excess of discussion about how much work women need to do to be considered attractive; but in fact the eye of the needle that men must thread to be attractive is much narrower still even if women refuse t realize that fact. So, no, I’m not going to countenance AB’s writing here at all, as it’s so self-servingly and perniciously disconnected from reality.
68. 

    Infra April 24, 2011 at 12:24 am #

    @Clarisse:

    Re: #67, isn’t that tone, style and formatting reminiscent of three late comments from a different thread?
69. 

    Bry S April 24, 2011 at 1:54 am #

    Firstly, thank you to Clarisse for writing these posts and setting up this forum. There are plenty of other places to discuss male sexuality: but as many commentators point out–these tend to go hand in hand with a lot of negative comments towards anything outside a PUA script.

    I have difficulty commenting on the article as I have had limited experience with this community, or pick-up (?): but I think some data is in order. Pick-up is becoming more mainstream, and if the future world where pick-up is mainstream is damaging to women then it is a valid cause for concern for feminists. An important question for feminists is to get some real data to sort out what PUA means for women. A quick google-scholar search (for citations of The Game) yielded this thesis, which is largely positive (and an enjoyable read)–it largely interprets PUA as relating to male group behavior (my term) that has always been common. This point is also made in this paper.

    I also found this paper on smooth speed-dating as well:

    The present data suggest that how
    one reacts to the partner is perhaps even more important for
    achieving good romantic outcomes. Do you express yourself
    without boldly asserting your independence from your interac-
    tion partner? Do you react warmly without relying on the part-
    ner to maintain the flow of the date? Do you maintain an active
    role in the conversation and avoid withdrawing or tuning out?

    This is in contrast to a lot of what I’ve read of PUA techniques (although I’m sure many PUAs would point out their importance). In any case, I think when dating is subjected to the scientific method you will get something very different from what I’ve read of PUAs. If men are really interested in pick-up and have some rationality then this should predict that pick-up is bound to change in the coming years. Conversation-focused types such as Wayne “Juggler” Elize and Jeremy Soul maybe more common than the routine-focused “Mystery” (he must have a real name…). That also has implications for what feminists might think of the community.
70. 

    Clarisse April 24, 2011 at 2:35 am #

    @Lathe — firstly, AB didn’t say that “conventionally attractive men are trying to arouse all straight men”, she said that “sex is equated with conventionally attractive women trying to arouse straight men on a routine basis”. Secondly, don’t make blanket statements about feminists or women. Thirdly, AB is not self-servingly and perniciously disconnected from reality, she’s experiencing things differently from the way you are, and in a way that’s highly similar to how many other women experience things. Fourthly, I’m really struggling to not interpret your comment as trolling, but it’s hard. If you comment in a similar vein again, I’ll put you on moderation.

    @Infra — I’ve noticed a lot of MRA commenters in various places do that period thing, I don’t know why. Maybe most MRA blogs use shitty wordpress themes that require that in order to get double returns, or something (I seem to recall that Susan Walsh’s does). #67 seems to have a real email address, unlike the ones you’re referring to.
71. 

    k April 24, 2011 at 3:17 am #

    Hugh, re: AB’s point about being perceived as a “tease” just for talking to men – in my opinion this is one of those experiences that’s absolutely common for women to have, but it’s largely invisible to decent men who’d never treat a woman that way and who mostly hang out with other men who know how to treat human beings.

    A good analogy might be to street harassment. In the past few years women have been opening up a lot more about the universal experience of being harassed. But a lot of men, who never observe the behaviors a select few asshole guys engage in when a woman is walking alone, simply have a hard time believing that such ridiculous shit happens. It is something that guys don’t necessarily see unless they engage in it themselves.

    And like street harassment, getting cussed out for being a “tease” after simply engaging in conversation, making eye contact briefly (yes indeed – this has happened to me), etc., is something that makes a lot of women feel extremely unsafe. I relate to AB’s feeling like the bar scene is “closed” to her because she doesn’t want to deal with these types of men.

    It really sucks for everyone that there are men out there who treat women that way, because it ruins a lot of good clean AND dirty fun that could be had. Personally, I love chatting with anyone and everyone in a bar – that’s why I have a second job at a bar! But it can be incredibly stressful to deal with a select minority of men.

    Is this dynamic something that many guys take into account when they talk about stuff like “bitch shields”? Because when I hear “bitch shield” I think “of course I come across as brash and bitchy sometimes, in order to shield myself from entitled harassers”.

    OK, that was a lot of words about a new subject, I’ll try to get around to replying to the old stuff in a bit :)
72. 

    k April 24, 2011 at 3:31 am #

    And just to be clear, Hugh, I think that jerks of the sort I’m talking about ARE a tiny minority of men. But encountering them is truly, truly exhausting and sometimes frightening. It shouldn’t be the case that men who’d never do such a thing feel like they’re the enemy in a “battle of the sexes” because women feel we have to constantly be on our guard against that small group of harassers… and yet, I’ve experienced that an hour of pleasant, casual, noncommittal conversation is no guarantee that a guy won’t blow up on me at the end of the night for not wanting to fuck him ASAP.

    It is stupid and it totally sucks. I think the only thing we can do is to approach other human beings with openness and good faith, and come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who accuses women of being “cockteases”.
73. 

    Infra April 24, 2011 at 3:32 am #

    @k:

    But a lot of men, who never observe the behaviors a select few asshole guys engage in when a woman is walking alone, simply have a hard time believing that such ridiculous shit happens.

    It’s difficult to recognize in other cases, too. It’s mostly related to my build and hair (when viewed from the back), and the style of some of my clothes (I used to order from International Male when I could afford it), but it wasn’t until I heard one of the guys in the car next to me say, “Fuck, man! That’s a dude!” just before the jeering stopped that I recognized that I’d been getting some of the same kind of harassment as women get.

    Previous to that, the honks and yells that I’d get from the passing vehicles just puzzled and annoyed me. Eye-opening experience, that was, and I’d almost go so far as to recommend it just for that reason.

    Is this dynamic something that many guys take into account when they talk about stuff like “bitch shields”? Because when I hear “bitch shield” I think “of course I come across as brash and bitchy sometimes, in order to shield myself from entitled harassers”.

    Didn’t used to, but, as suggested by the above… I do now.
74. 

    Clarisse April 24, 2011 at 3:44 am #

    @Sagredo #29 — Other folk who are not so good at it, need to make an effort in figuring out how to respond, aware that if they do so badly, they’ll be less successful in the interaction. For them it really is a test.

    I just wanted to say thanks for this comment, even though it’s old, because it helps me put PUAs seeing things as “tests” in a more positive frame. I’m still not really comfortable with it — it’s more of the reducing-women-to-NPCs thing, basically — but I guess I’m more comfortable with that than I am with reducing-women-to-bitches-who-are-always-manipulating :P

    @Sam — But really, how is this not a rephrasing of “check your privilege”? How is this not a rephrasing of “how entitled is it if heterosexual men talk about problems when the entire world is built around their sexuality?” How is it possible to make an argument about how privileges aren’t even noticed by those holding them without being willing to accept that oneself could be the bearer of privileges one is equally unaware of? How is that paragraph not a slippery slope into oppression olympics?

    Well … you and I have discussed before that I actually find the “check your privilege” injunction to be useful, whereas you don’t.

    I guess what it really comes down to for me is that I’m convinced that one of the big holes in current PUAdom is a general (though not universal) lack of understanding of women’s experience, and disinterest in learning about women’s experience. As I wrote on the ePUA thread, how many PUAs who discuss LMR tactics even know that rape survivors sometimes freeze up and can’t respond when they’re being retraumatized? How many of them would listen if someone tried to tell them? That’s an extreme example, but it’s replicated frequently in the subculture to lesser degrees. There are exceptions, but they’re exceptions.

    When I started investigating this whole line, I quickly drew one conclusion that I haven’t really deviated from, which is that no matter how much PUAs are suffering from not getting female attention, it doesn’t justify the way so many of them dismiss or don’t care to hear about women’s experience when they try to learn about seducing women. There’s something really appalling and horrible about the way so many men (not just PUAs, really) will insist, not just on the Internet but to my face, that my life is just so awesome because I can go get laid “whenever I want” (supposedly) with guys who aren’t them (how dare I!), with no understanding of how damaging and scary and problematic that prospect is, and how thoroughly female sexuality simply does not tend to work that way — not even mine, non-normative as I am. It leads to this insane sense of resentment based on nothing at all — a prize that I don’t even want. And not emphasizing women’s experience, stuff like suppression of female sexuality and societal centering of men’s sexuality, is what creates that kind of attitude.

    @k — Yeah, PUAs generally acknowledge that women develop bitch shields as a result of being approached a lot. I’ve met very few who actually comprehend the reality of street harassment, etc, but most of them get that bitch shields are usually a direct result of women fending guys off a lot. They don’t see it as women dealing with “entitled harassers” though … usually they think they resent us for getting so much attention ;)
75. 

    Clarisse April 24, 2011 at 3:47 am #

    @Infra — Previous to that, the honks and yells that I’d get from the passing vehicles just puzzled and annoyed me. Eye-opening experience, that was, and I’d almost go so far as to recommend it just for that reason.

    It’s much worse for androgynous or obviously trans people, I think — people (especially most men) seem to be so unsettled by genderqueer, it’s really stunning. I get my share of street harassment, but it seems to be mild compared to what my trans friends report, or even the male submissives I know who dress up as female. On the other hand, perhaps I notice it less due to the fact that it’s always happening and has been since my teens :P
76. 

    AB April 24, 2011 at 3:50 am #

    @Clarisse:

    the general focus of these threads is, in fairness, masculinity, and communities that are focused on men’s desires, so it makes sense for masculinity and male desire to be the main topic.

    I know, and I try to appreciate it, but there’s just one thing that keeps bothering me about conversations like these.

    In the real world, some of the most marginalised men and male-bodied individuals, subject to more of everything from harassment to hate crimes, are those who do not subscribe to traditional or stereotypical masculinity. Gays, transsexuals, cross-dressers, sexually submissive, or just men who’re plain effeminate or who’ve taken over a traditionally female role in one or more areas.

    But as soon as it comes to debates about sex and gender, especially those that aren’t explicitly female-focussed, that reality suddenly changes, and it becomes all about how masculinity is threatened, how straight, cisgender men with a stereotypical male sexuality aren’t accepted enough, how men aren’t allowed to be men. As if the battle for men to be allowed to be anything other than traditionally/stereotypically masculine had been fought and won decades ago.

    In the same way, in reality, there’s quite a stigma against men who date women who aren’t stereotypically desirable to them (e.g. older, fat), with guys being more reluctant to be seen with fat women while few of them seem embarrassed to show of their latest skinny conquest. And yet, whenever there’s a serious debate about sexual stigmas, it seems only heavy moderation can prevent it from being turned into straight, cisgender men of conventional taste setting themselves up as representatives of the male sex and telling people how important it is to accept the fundamental male desire for slim, young, and conventionally attractive girls.

    I can’t help remember thinking about what I’ve seen mentioned (especially by straight, cisgender men with a stereotypical male sexuality) a couple of hundred times about feminism, that it is a movement for straight, white, middle-class women. That they, as one of the biggest and by far the most influential group, are promoting an agenda that’s every bit as ignorant as that of the men they’re complaining about, and that they’re railing against alleged oppression while using their own privilege to set themselves up as the norm.

    And sometimes I can recognise it, though the feminists that spring to mind are not so much the white academics that men are complaining over as those cool and hip young women who watch Sex & the City, shave not just their armpits but their whole body, take poledancing lessons, have 20 pairs of designer shoes in their closet, and are always talking about how feminism needs a facelift, and how old, fat, hairy women are giving feminists (i.e. them) a bad name, oblivious to why their lifestyle is not for everyone.

    So when I see the same group of people, who’re always pointing it out (and often rightly so) when feminism fails to take less mainstream/privileged women into account, start using their even more considerable influence to do the exact same thing, it annoys me in no small way. It’s like what’s happening to feminism on steroids, and it’s not just damaging for the men whose sexuality is truly marginalised, but also for women, because we’re affected just as much by the way the sexuality of straight, cisgender men with stereotypical tastes is set up as the norm.

    I don’t want to play the Oppression Olympics, but when someone can link to a blog which is supposedly about sexuality for everyone, but only contains material about porn for straight men, without noticing the contradiction, and simultaneously talk about men and masculinity as marginalised in society, as what happened in the Creep thread….. well, I find it pretty hard to accept that this kind of sexuality is what we need to normalise even more, because its perceived normalcy is already excluding a lot of people.
77. 

    Infra April 24, 2011 at 3:55 am #

    @Clarisse:

    It’s much worse for androgynous or obviously trans people, I think — people (especially most men) seem to be so unsettled by genderqueer, it’s really stunning.

    No doubt; I had a conversation about that with one trans woman that I met in this area, some years back, and the severity of it still sticks in my mind. It’s an especially difficult thing during the initial parts of transition.

    I consider myself fortunate in that way, because it wasn’t an androgynous thing. If you know who Nuno Bettencourt is (the guitarist best known from the ’80-90s band Extreme), that’s pretty much the look that I had. So once they recognized me as a guy, they tended to back off.

    Which just heightened the impact of the experience.
78. 

    k April 24, 2011 at 4:07 am #

    Oh, Infra, that sounds so confusing! I am decidedly female but have a slight build and run around in Docs, straight legged jeans, and sweatshirts a lot and have short hair, so I come across as androgynous sometimes. And somehow, that just seems to make harassers really angry. I can’t imagine what it was like to deal with that kind of response without knowing what it was about. Eye-opening is right.
    Clarisse, it cracks me up to imagine someone thinking of unwanted, random sexual attention as a privilege. But then again I had to shove a guy out of my path last night because my innocent question about where a nearby hostel was, turned into him making explicit sexual gestures at me and screaming I NEED YOUR PUSSY!!! while refusing to let me pass him on the sidewalk, so ya know. Oh but I was totally wearing a short skirt what a tease I am.
79. 

    k April 24, 2011 at 4:27 am #

    For nathan’s comment, #50:

    So, the reason I am pointing out the “nice guy” meme is that it is something I have experienced firsthand – being skipped over because I appeared to be a “nice guy” with no backbone – and also because it’s a reoccurring theme in women’s writing about dating – feminist, or otherwise. And I think whenever a theme keeps reoccurring in dating narratives that generalizes based on gender, red flags should go up.

    Oh, now I see what kind of “nice guy” issue you mean! I was talking about this kind: http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2007/12/16/the-internet-nice-guy-rears-his-ugly-head-once-more/ which I think is a very internet-specific usage of the term. Anyway. Moving on.

    I do sympathize with your worries, as someone who has trouble coming out of my shell romantically / sexually unless I’ve done a little observing of someone’s character over a longer period of time. But this is one area where women definitely do have an advantage – men are expected to initiate. I don’t know, does it help to know that there are women who also only start perceiving someone as a potential partner after getting to know them a bit?
80. 

    Sam April 24, 2011 at 9:41 am #

    clarisse,

    not much time right now, will replay to your comment in detail later, just this:

    “Well … you and I have discussed before that I actually find the “check your privilege” injunction to be useful, whereas you don’t.”

    not exactly what I said. I said it’s useful for *introspection* but dangerous as a discourse-structuring device. Here’s my last comment on that matter (in which I also mention how I have a lot of conventional feminist “privilege”). For reference, Here’s my main comment in our last discussion about this.

    http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2010/10/15/manliness-and-feminism-2-judgment-day/
81. 

    Sam April 24, 2011 at 9:48 am #

    k,

    Clarisse, it cracks me up to imagine someone thinking of unwanted, random sexual attention as a privilege. But then again I had to shove a guy out of my path last night because my innocent question about where a nearby hostel was, turned into him making explicit sexual gestures at me and screaming I NEED YOUR PUSSY!!! while refusing to let me pass him on the sidewalk, so ya know. Oh but I was totally wearing a short skirt what a tease I am.

    sorry you met such an asshole.
82. 

    nathan April 24, 2011 at 7:23 pm #

    AB “But as soon as it comes to debates about sex and gender, especially those that aren’t explicitly female-focussed, that reality suddenly changes, and it becomes all about how masculinity is threatened, how straight, cisgender men with a stereotypical male sexuality aren’t accepted enough, how men aren’t allowed to be men. As if the battle for men to be allowed to be anything other than traditionally/stereotypically masculine had been fought and won decades ago.”

    I agree with this in general; I’ve seen this kind of derail over and over again. But I fail to see how it applies to this particular thread. I’m not seeing the men here defending stereotypical straight guy masculinity, at least for the most part. In fact, some of the male comments here are pointing to exactly how any man who doesn’t fit that stereotypical masculinity also suffers because of that centralized and privileged masculine norm.

    And you know, when I hear those MRA type comments about masculinity being threatened, they aren’t representing me. I’m part of the “threat.” Hell, I’ve been told in activist circles that I’m “not much of a man” because I am against war, and advocate for non-violent action and compassion as a basis for any social intervention. Traditional masculinity fucks guys like me over and over again, and certainly not just in the realm of dating and relationships.

    Infra’s comment about looks and street harassment – I’ve had that as well. Not only was I mistaken for a woman a few times when I had long hair, but also experienced a fair amount of anti-gay harassment from dudes yelling from cars.

    Now, I’ll be the first to admit that on other websites (and even a few times on other threads here) I sometimes have failed to wait to check these particular issues when discussions are supposed to be female-centered. Specifically, when I see totalizing language suggesting “All men act like this” or “Men think like that,” it’s hard not to want to react. Because these narratives, when framed in those ways, simply maintain the privileging and centralizing of traditional masculinity. Perhaps it’s best to not comment in these case anyway, but I can’t help but thinking that this is part of the problem. (I.e. The men who represent different views from the privileged norm are basically silenced, told that they are an “exception to the rule,” or that they are playing “what about the menz”) For the record, I have never felt silenced on Clarisse’s blog – I’m talking about other spaces when I speak of being silenced.

    @Clarisse “I guess what it really comes down to for me is that I’m convinced that one of the big holes in current PUAdom is a general (though not universal) lack of understanding of women’s experience, and disinterest in learning about women’s experience.” I totally agree. In fact, I’d say not only are female experiences and views ignored or diminished, but I also think the experiences and views of men who aren’t of the masculine norm aren’t terribly supported either. If you are a man who cares about female experience, who wants to engage fully with someone (and not just win a hook up game or bag a new girlfriend), what good is a lot of what’s offered by PUAs?
83. 

    SnowdropExplodes April 24, 2011 at 7:29 pm #

    Re: the street harassment thing -

    On Wednesday I had my hair cut short for the first time in nearly 20 years and I can definitely relate to Infra’s comments. The tooted horns, yells and (on one occasion) being sprayed with the windscreen wiper, are things I will definitely not miss about having long hair. (Although since I still display some feminine mannerisms, I may still get it as homophobic abuse instead *shrugs*)

    Also @ Infra: “If you know who Nuno Bettencourt is (the guitarist best known from the ’80-90s band Extreme), that’s pretty much the look that I had.”

    I sooooo love that look, Bettencourt was (is?) a sexy man!
84. 

    Sagredo April 24, 2011 at 8:01 pm #

    I can’t help remember thinking about what I’ve seen mentioned (especially by straight, cisgender men with a stereotypical male sexuality) a couple of hundred times about feminism, that it is a movement for straight, white, middle-class women.

    Actually I hear this more from black and working-class women. I can’t (out of ignorance) speak to its validity or to the differences between “feminism” and “womanism” or whatever. What I hear from straight cisgender men with a stereotypical male sexuality is that feminism is a movement for women, and therefore doesn’t pay attention to men.

    I daresay this complaint rather misses the point of feminism, as feminism is a deliberate focus on women and on advocating for women exactly as its name suggests. But it does mean that in those rare circumstances when one does want to understand men, one is going to have to step outside the woman-centered worldview. For instance, when a large number of men report a desire for younger women of high social status with symmetrical faces and not too much body fat, or whatever, it isn’t helpful to harrumph about “traditional masculinity”. When men report all kinds of other desires, it isn’t helpful to hold them up as exemplars of correct male desire to the unreconstructed gendernorm mass. That actually doesn’t promote diversity. It needs to be left up to the individual to find whom they are attracted to and why.

    That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that female behaviour is criticised all the time, including (perhaps especially) by feminists, but every time the same happens to men, people resort to the old cliché about men not being allowed to be men, as if improving themselves is some betrayal of who they are as a sex.

    Such denial! Actually I see this line of thought all the time from folks who believe that gender differences are entirely socially constructed. Male desires are considered a kind of pathology if they’re too “normal”. And the problems start when “improving themselves” means holding male (and female) desires to a single standard that is in practice based on women since, of course, social construction is arbitrary and harmful in its assortment by binary gender.

    And it’s worth bearing in mind that such notions, like feminism generally, and indeed like PUA and MRA and everything else, are part of the marketplace of ideas that ultimately guides societies. What you say has an effect on the world, so you’d better get it right.
85. 

    Sagredo April 24, 2011 at 8:11 pm #

    There’s something really appalling and horrible about the way so many men (not just PUAs, really) will insist, not just on the Internet but to my face, that my life is just so awesome because I can go get laid “whenever I want” (supposedly) with guys who aren’t them (how dare I!),

    Dudes are totally failing to DHV. Your life would be more awesome if I let you get laid with me. (is the PUA attitude.)

    Actually it amuses me how much PUA echoes women’s complaints about men. For instance, I’m convinced that those creepy “nice guys” and Roissy’s “betas” are in fact the same men.
86. 

    Lathe of Heaven April 24, 2011 at 9:44 pm #

    “There’s something really appalling and horrible about the way so many men (not just PUAs, really) will insist, not just on the Internet but to my face, that my life is just so awesome because I can go get laid “whenever I want” (supposedly) with guys who aren’t them (how dare I!),”

    So you might sympathize, then? with the feelings of the decent-enough young man who can’t find a decent job and who hasn’t gotten laid in two years, and yet is endlessly lectured by a never-ending stream of feminists about the incalculable heights and depths of his “male privilege”. You’re not the only one whose observable reality differs sharply from someone else’s “official” version of what is true.
87. 

    Hugh Ristik April 25, 2011 at 5:46 am #

    Clarisse said:

    I guess what it really comes down to for me is that I’m convinced that one of the big holes in current PUAdom is a general (though not universal) lack of understanding of women’s experience, and disinterest in learning about women’s experience.

    This is a hole in PUAdom, and it’s also a case where PUAs are held to a higher standard than other people. Are PUAs really worse than non-PUA men for their lack of understanding of women’s experience, or worse that women’s lack of understanding of men’s experience?

    I don’t mind people focusing that critique on PUAs, as long as they acknowledge in the abstract that it applies to other groups of people.

    I would argue that PUAs occupy both the high-end and and low-end of men’s understanding of women’s experience, and interest in learning about women’s experience.

    As I wrote on the ePUA thread, how many PUAs who discuss LMR tactics even know that rape survivors sometimes freeze up and can’t respond when they’re being retraumatized?

    I don’t think most PUAs understand this notion, which is why certain LMR tactics exist. Luckily, I heard about this idea independently of criticism of pickup, so I wasn’t biased against it by the long history of people criticizing pickup and being horribly confused and wrong.
88. 

    Hugh Ristik April 25, 2011 at 6:03 am #

    Warning, book-length post ahead.

    Clarisse said:

    How many of them would listen if someone tried to tell them? That’s an extreme example, but it’s replicated frequently in the subculture to lesser degrees. There are exceptions, but they’re exceptions.

    How many Africans are receptive to moral criticism from Westerners, based on your experiences in Africa? How many feminists are receptive to moral criticism from MRAs, or other critics of feminism? Exceptions notwithstanding…

    In a world where only ethical considerations existed, everyone should just listen to any ethical criticism from anyone with an open mind and adapt. Everyone should listen to the experiences of others.

    But in the real world, we don’t just have ethical considerations, we also have political considerations. Politics are a negotiation. You will lose in a negotiation if you just make concessions to others without them making any concessions to you. If you give in to one demand, then what stops them from making another?

    Unfortunately, sometimes one group does have the reasonable moral argument on some topic than another. Yet the political polarization prevents them from standing down even when they are in the wrong.

    We see this situation with PUAs, and also with feminists hanging on to ridiculous and biased concepts like “patriarchy,” or defining “sexism”, “oppression”, and “privilege” as one way streets. Feminists must reasonably wonder, “if we accept a demand to abandon this concept, what stops anti-feminists from escalating their demands until feminism is completely gutted?”

    So how can people negotiate? One way is through trust. You have to feel that if you accept a reasonable demand from another group, it won’t open the door to unreasonable future demands. In the area of sexuality, men and PUAs are often asking for understanding of their experiences. Although this might partly have selfish motives, it could be because these men are trying to negotiate: they are saying “we are interested in listening to you, but please show us that you know enough about our situation that we can trust you.”

    Unfortunately, there is a lot of trust lacking between PUAs and feminists (or other people who criticize PUAs), for many reasons.

    Another way that people negotiate without trust or communication is through Schelling Points, which are lines in the sand that both people recognize.

    Friedman quotes Rudyard Kipling:

    It is in my long run interest not to back down because if I do I can expect further demands: “if once you have paid him the danegeld/You never get rid of the Dane.”

    He suggests that in property negotiation, people who don’t trust each other will often use features of the landscape to divide the property:

    If their ability to coerce and defend is roughly equal, and if there is some natural division of contested property (such as a stream running between their farms), it is likely that they will find a Schelling point in the form of an agreement to accept that division, respect each other’s rights, and pay no tribute.
    [...]
    If one (being, perhaps, slightly more powerful) tries to insist on a small tribute, arguing that it will still leave the other better off than continued conflict, the other may believably refuse, arguing that once he concedes any tribute there is no natural limit to what the other can demand. Agreeing to tribute costs the victim not only the tribute but the only available Schelling point. The expected cost to him of such an agreement includes both the possible cost of paying higher tribute in the future and the risk of future conflicts if in the future he rejects demands for higher tribute. That cost may be high enough to make his insistence that he will choose continued conflict over the payment of even a small tribute believable.

    This explains why many PUAs and feminists prefer continued conflict over accepting even a small and reasonable criticism.

    So far we have considered the Schelling point that generates an agreement. But the agreement itself, whether generated by a Schelling point or in some other way, is thereafter itself a Schelling point. It is a unique outcome of which both players are conscious. Once it has been made, a policy of “if you do not abide by the agreement I will revert to the use of force, even if the violation is small compared to the cost of conflict” is believable for precisely the same reason the refusal to pay tribute, or any insistence by a bargainer on a Schelling point, is believable. The signing of a contract establishes a new Schelling point and thereby alters the strategic situation. The contract enforces itself.

    This analysis suggests that to come to a new agreement, there needs to be a new Schelling Point. In other words, if you want to convince me that our division of property by the stream should be changed, you can’t just say “I want some stuff on your side.” Because then if I let you across the stream, you can just keep creeping forward. Instead, for it to be safe for me to accept a new agreement, there must be some other stream or feature of the landscape that can become a new Schelling Point past which you can’t advance.

    The concept of a Schelling Point explains some aspects of the debate over pickup:

    - Rejecting any moral criticism from outsiders. As we have just learned, people tend to respond excessively when they perceive others trying to a cross a Schelling Point. In this case, the Schelling Point could be “criticizing us,” or “criticizing us without understanding our experience,” or “criticizing us without letting us criticize you.” PUAs may punish any attempts at crossing these Schelling Points by categorically rejecting moral criticism.

    - Asking for moral criticism of women, or providing it themselves. From a purely ethical standpoint, if someone’s ethical argument is sound, then that doesn’t depend on whether they criticize other people or not: if an argument against a pickup behavior is sound, that it’s still sound even if the person giving it is a hypocrite who fails to criticize women. Furthermore, if I PUAs are in the wrong, it isn’t justified because women are also in the wrong.

    Yet as we recognized earlier, ethics isn’t the only consideration. If feminists are trying to criticize PUAs without accepting criticism towards women, then they are trying to cross a “I can criticize you, but you can’t criticize me” Schelling Point, which PUAs can’t allow for game theoretic reasons: even if the initial criticism is sound, it’s just a bad political practice to let other groups criticize you when they won’t accept criticism themselves. Any political group who did that would simply get run over by other groups and destroyed. If feminists are willing to criticize women in addition to PUAs, then it builds trust, but it also lets PUAs relax from defending that Schelling Point.

    - Asking for feminist pickup advice. Men and PUAs ask for it for many reasons, but one is trying to find a new Schelling Point. The message to feminism is “OK, we will agree that certain behaviors are unethical and we won’t do them… but we need you to agree on what stuff we can do, so you can’t come along tomorrow and ask for more restrictions on our behavior.”

    For instance, feminists might propose that all physical touch should be proceeded by asking verbally and being accepted verbally. In response, we all should ask: what’s the moral principle, here? Why should this be a new Schelling Point? If we agree to this proposal, what’s to stop feminists from coming around tomorrow and saying “hey, you guys proved that you care about protecting women by asking once, but now we really think you need to ask twice if you really care about consent”? If we agree to the “ask once” rule, how do defend ourselves against the new “ask twice” rule… or the “ask thrice” rule? Some sort of moral principle must be laid down in advance, explaining why asking once is the right number of times, and why asking less or more times is inappropriate.

    What I am trying to develop is a shared moral framework with feminists. The principles of this framework will serve as Schelling Points. Without feminists agreeing to behaviors that are permitted, I would fear that their concern for women and lack of understanding of men’s experience would lead them to a series of escalating restrictions on men. I would be willing to make certain moral agreements, but I want to see an acknowledment from feminists that certain sorts of mind-reading and contingency planning are excessive, and that men are justified in rejecting feminist demands for them.

    I would argue that some PUAs have LMR about accepting moral ideas from the outside: they may want to on some level (because they are mostly good people), but certain factors prevent them from acting on that desire. Some of these factors are a lack of trust of critics (particularly feminists), political polarization, and a feeling that critics are trying to cross Schelling Points: “I can criticize you, but you can’t criticize me”, “I can criticize you without understanding what you are dealing with,” and “you have to criticize your people, but I don’t have to criticize my people.”

    Men and PUAs shouldn’t have their morals judged as lacking merely because they are unwilling to sign a blank check allowing feminists to morally criticize them unilaterally… with no new agreements that would prevent escalating feminist moral demands. I think many men and PUAs would be more receptive to moral precautions from feminists if it was clear where these precautions ended, and why.

    In their defense, it might be complicated and tough for feminists to outline those principles. But if feminists can’t figure out where their precautions end, then men have a valid complaint about being paralyzed by them, and feminists should be cautious of advancing a policy that would paralyze all the scrupulous men in the dating world, limiting women to unscrupulous men.

    Moral criticism of women’s dating behavior, requests for understanding of their experience, and requests for positive feminist dating advice might be selfish deflections, but they could also be attempts to arrive at greater trust and a shared moral framework with feminists that could serve as a basis for new agreements: “show me how it safe for me to go along with what you’re saying.”

    When feminists try to cross these Schelling Points with no recognition of new ones, then PUAs respond irrationally because they only have two obvious choices: lay down and surrender to escalating feminist moral judgments, or resist any attempt at criticism (even though some of it they might be sympathetic to in another context). I believe there are some other options, but they are much harder. For instance, I am sometimes willing to agree with some criticisms of pickup… while describing the moral principles behind this disagreement in detail, so that I use those principles to defend myself from escalating demands. However, this takes a lot of work, and the position I am carving out is precarious.
89. 

    humbition April 25, 2011 at 10:17 am #

    I thought I could quit this discussion…

    Hugh I really must disagree with your account of what ethics is. I am pretty much an ethical libertarian in a way. Ethics is what I ought to do in a particular situation, based on some (grounded) idea of the way things are in that situation. (Morality is what I tell other people they should do, but I don’t do much of this.)

    What you are describing is a game theory account of what we think of as power. But if someone asserts their power toward me, and I comply, I’m not doing it out of ethics. I am doing it out of prudential considerations, which is a grownup weasel expression for fear. Ethics, if it has any meaning, is independent of game-theoretical power in this sense. It is my own sense of what it means to treat other people as I ought to treat human beings.

    I don’t therefore give, others the power to define my own ethics. My ethics is me and therefore my ethics are intrinsically not a political football to be fought over like property lines by political “sides” who are in any event, highly hypocritical in practice (we are talking about sex after all).

    What is political is, of course, legislation, rules, enforcement. But that is another issue.

    If my ethics are not based on the “truth” of a situation as I see it, if they are captive to the rhetorics of one side or another, this is not an authentic ethics in the first place. Now I might strategically decide not to tell you what my ethics are, to avoid getting into an argument. Or I might choose to talk about them, so that I know that I am thinking straight. This depends on trust.

    I do not even concede that the “sides” in the “property dispute” you are talking about even exist. In sex there are so many defections and hypocrisies and double standards and polite “whitewashes” of situations, that people have never talked straight even though they have talked nonstop about these things for probably since the invention of language. The attempt to talk straight is noble and somewhat new, though it isn’t what gets you “success” — what gets you that, is a complete strategic acceptance of whatever the going social lies happen to be.
90. 

    Sam April 25, 2011 at 10:59 am #

    humbition,

    still no time to comment in detail – but this:

    “I do not even concede that the “sides” in the “property dispute” you are talking about even exist.”

    Fair point, but I would argue that Hugh is still not too far off in his characterization of the nature of the debate, particularly when it comes to axiomatic discussions (check the brief exchange between Clarisse and me about a post about “privilege” on tigerbeatdown which I linked to in my last comment). I also think that precisely because of the conflict you and Hugh are having here, I would say that ethics that are merely self-reflective (only behaving considering how I think things should be) are oxymoronic, because ethical behaviour is always defined *in relation to others* – and that includes the other’s assumed strategic behaviour in his/her interactions with me. Of course, there’s a certain circularity in this, but “going external” doesn’t help either.
91. 

    humbition April 25, 2011 at 11:46 am #

    Sam, of course ethical behavior is defined in relation to others. Ethical autonomy is not the same as solipsism.

    We are almost in the same waters, though, as the Science Wars, believe it or not. There is a politics of scientific theorizing, but is there a scientific method that stands apart from that? If science is only the politics of science and all its truth claims are only political, then what recourse do we have if we live in some state in the U.S. whose legislature has enacted that creationism is what is true?

    Again with ethics. There is a politics of ethical claims, and I think this is what Hugh is describing. He is describing a strategic approach to a politics of ethical claims. But are these claims about something? A Kantian would say definitively yes, and ironically I am more relativistic than the Kantians are, but I still do not think that ethics is only its politics.

    Now, there is an important politics about axioms, but this politics enters into what the LessWrong-osphere would call “signaling.” I proclaim that I believe in certain axioms and therefore that I am a good person, or on a certain side in a debate, or something. And this can help get me status, or sex, or whatever…

    Meanwhile there is the province of ethics itself, what I need to do in order to be able to live with myself. Some people do without this, and manage to articulate the axioms as well as anybody! For the rest of us, in order to determine our ethics, we have to evaluate what we think is true. Is this precaution actually called for? Will behaving this way really possibly hurt someone? and under what conditions? and how can I mitigate those conditions? Ultimately I think this is applied compassion, and if it is applied compassion, then it can’t be made dependent on someone’s view of where they want an Overton window.

    As for someone telling me that I have to do more than applied compassion would demand, I then apply my autonomy criterion, and say, who made him or her God? (Or, if I were a theist, who made him or her the interpreter of God.) I may in such a case prudentially comply with a social morality — but this isn’t ethics.
92. 

    Infra April 25, 2011 at 2:47 pm #

    (humbition, in reply to Hugh)

    I do not even concede that the “sides” in the “property dispute” you are talking about even exist.

    This was the part of Hugh’s comment that bothered me. I wouldn’t say that the sides don’t exist, but it’s a particular discussion that’s being referenced, or at least one that’s applicable mostly to people with particular stances; and my immediate reaction to reading it was “This situation is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. I probably shouldn’t comment until I see how reactions to it play out, because I don’t want to get pulled into association with a position I don’t hold.”

    In that respect, I agree with humbition’s statement that what’s being described is a game theory account of power, and especially with the statement that “My ethics is me and therefore my ethics are intrinsically not a political football to be fought over like property lines by political ‘sides’ [...].” Hugh’s account of the situation might be accurate, but I think that it’s important to emphasize that it refers to particular groups with particular positions, and isn’t representative of those who don’t identify with them.
93. 

    Sagredo April 25, 2011 at 6:00 pm #

    As I wrote on the ePUA thread, how many PUAs who discuss LMR tactics even know that rape survivors sometimes freeze up and can’t respond when they’re being retraumatized?

    I’d like to pick this up because LMR tactics are a frequent target of criticism. If one is talking about Gunwitch-style “make the ho say no”, that criticism is absolutely deserved as it pushes into some very rapey territory. On the other hand, the tactics I’m familiar with run like this:

    her: We shouldn’t be doing this.
    him: You’re right, we shouldn’t be doing this. [stops all touching and sexual attention]

    Note that the response to LMR is to back off, not push forward. This might not be exactly what the woman wants, but I don’t think she’s entitled to his attention. In fact I don’t even think of this as a “tactic”, it’s more expressing a limit.
94. 

    Clarisse April 25, 2011 at 11:12 pm #

    Note that the response to LMR is to back off, not push forward. This might not be exactly what the woman wants, but I don’t think she’s entitled to his attention. In fact I don’t even think of this as a “tactic”, it’s more expressing a limit.

    Entitlement is a tricky word. No, she’s not entitled. He can be a total asshole as much as he wants, for example, and she is not entitled to interact with a guy who’s not an asshole.

    Not all LMR tactics are rape attempts. Some of them lead to situations that I think are pretty clearly rape (e.g. guys who keep going when the woman is actually saying no — there are field reports outlining behavior like this). Some of them just lead to situations that seem more like the guy is being an asshole (like the stuff I posted to the ePUA thread). If your partner suddenly turns cold and distant when you set a boundary, are they raping you? No, they’re just guilt tripping and capitalizing on your desire to be liked and generally manipulating you.

    As I said on the ePUA thread, and apparently have to say every single time I criticize LMR tactics: there are ways to express boundaries without being cold and distant. When a partner tells me, “I don’t want to have sex right now,” I don’t react by turning away and turning on the lights and removing my touch and checking my fucking email. I react by saying, “Okay, that’s fine,” and reassuring him again that it’s fine if he feels self-conscious about it. In one instance, for example, my partner seemed freaked out because he felt like he owed me something, so I said, “That’s ridiculous, you don’t owe it to me to have sex with me,” and I laughed after I said it to show how ridiculous it was, and he laughed too. THAT’S what respecting boundaries looks like.

    LMR tactics are not about PUAs “setting limits”. They’re about busting through last minute resistance. That’s why they’re CALLED LMR TACTICS.
95. 

    Clarisse April 25, 2011 at 11:50 pm #

    @AB — I don’t want to play the Oppression Olympics, but when someone can link to a blog which is supposedly about sexuality for everyone, but only contains material about porn for straight men, without noticing the contradiction, and simultaneously talk about men and masculinity as marginalised in society, as what happened in the Creep thread….. well, I find it pretty hard to accept that this kind of sexuality is what we need to normalise even more, because its perceived normalcy is already excluding a lot of people.

    Agreed. I guess what I’m always looking for is language for how to accept so-called “normal” desires and sexuality, while still emphasizing that they are not and ought not be seen as “normal”. It’s hard. Pushback always seems to create a new “normal”. I guess it’s helpful for people to adjust to themselves (hey look, I can be normal too!) but the drawbacks are obvious …. And people who are societally centered, whose dominance is being challenged, need to not be allowed to maintain themselves in the “normal” position, which is what they’re often trying to do when they complain about how harmed they feel by the discourses that attack their privilege.

    Privilege is nice to have. Most people aren’t going to give it up without a fight. They’ll probably have completely human emotions about feeling attacked, hurt, harmed, alienated from themselves, etc. if their social centeredness is threatened. This is, for example, the problem that comes up with a lot of cis people who feel threatened by the very acknowledgment of trans people — especially cis men, who feel particularly threatened, and yet who I think it must be acknowledged have more to “lose” (because masculinity is a more precarious “status” to “keep hold of”, and men generally feel more threatened more easily; references include papers with titles like “Precarious Manhood”). Yes, that feeling of threat may be genuine, and may indeed be a difficult emotional process for that cis person. But no, that does not justify denying the trans person services or acknowledgment or social status simply for being trans. It’s hard to know how to talk to a cis person who is in this space.

    @HR — interesting breakdown. Like other commenters, I think you’re right about the practical situation. It feels like ethics should be outside the practical situation, but I suppose it never is.

    argh, it’s making me want to start Confessions over from square one. I HATE THIS ARTICLE. IT WILL NEVER BE FINISHED, OR PUBLISHABLE EVEN IF IT’S FINISHED. I DON’T KNOW WHY I EVER WANTED TO BE A WRITER. okay, sorry about that, I’m okay now.
96. 

    Sagredo April 26, 2011 at 2:46 am #

    So I went and Googled around on “LMR tactics” and found quite a range of advice. Some of it is along the lines of finding out where the issue is and reassuring her that, for instance, you don’t think she’s a slut, or whatever. Some of it is along the lines of providing convenient scapegoats for her to blame her self-perceived sluttiness on, such as “we were playing strip poker and it just happened”. This is slightly cynical I guess, but whatever. Some of it I thought might be a bit pushy, like going back to the last acceptable thing and trying again. Some of it was to agree with abstract “should” statements but to continue anyway (but as they always take great care to point out, honour actual requests such as “please stop”). And then some of it is variations on stopping.

    One suggestion was to stop and go take a shower, and then invite her to join you. Another was to go to sleep. Sometimes it had the very scary name of “freeze-out”, but on examination this turned out to be purely stopping kino, and not any kind of emotional coldness, because coldness comes across as spiteful and needy.

    This pretty much reflects my own view. Stopping is not about pushing guilt or negative feelings on someone, it’s not about suggesting she’s a bad person or that she owes sex or that she is a “tease” or becoming emotionally cold or distant. It is a withdrawal from physical intimacy. It is setting a limit on physical behaviour. It’s “I like you and respect you, but I’m not interested in cuddling without sex”. It’s backing off and giving space for the woman to decide what she wants.

    I have to say, I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that men are obliged to continue to be intimate when they’re no longer interested, just because a woman wants to be touched. That smells like entitlement to me. But sometimes men continue when they don’t really want to because of their own insecurities, because for instance they have internalised that they are fundamentally unworthy of sex with any woman and this is the closest they can get.

    This establishment of boundaries gets lumped under “LMR tactics” because it turns out sometimes women change their minds and decide they do want sex after all when the option of just cuddling is not available. And even from the most amoral and instrumentalising manipulative PUA point of view, apparently the “like you and respect you” part is actually pretty important if one wants her to choose sex.

    There is a further PUA-ish claim that I am unsure about, and that is that a firm setting of boundaries of this kind typically makes one more attractive to women as a demonstration of higher value. I can kind of see it but I also think the DHV thing can get a bit fake sometimes. On the other hand, continuing to do something one doesn’t really want to do is self-devaluation, and that really should be avoided.
97. 

    Sam April 26, 2011 at 3:23 am #

    Clarisse,

    well, I find it pretty hard to accept that this kind of sexuality is what we need to normalise even more, because its perceived normalcy is already excluding a lot of people.

    Your agreeing with this statement is a tad bit puzzling to me. Maybe I don’t understand – as always a real possibility -, but to me it either implies that AB is talking about some male sexuality that this series of threads is not about, or that there is not much need for a masculinity discussion at all, at least if it doesn’t follow the classic antagonist narrative just described by Hugh Ristik. And since you started this unusual seried of exchanges you probably don’t believe the latter.

    As I’ve said in my reply to AB, in my opinion this entire debate is premised on the mutual acceptance of problems and the assumption that there is a way to both reconfigure currently conflicting interests as not actually confliciting, and – where a reconfiguration is impossible – that they can largely be balanced in a mutually acceptable way.

    Remember your opening question?

    A male friend once wrote to me, “I think you personally find expressions of masculinity hot, but you also have no patience with sexism. You’ve caught on that it’s tricky for men to figure out how to deliver both of these things you need, that you don’t have a lot of good direction to give to fellas about it, and that neither does anyone else.”

    I just read this in a review of some psychological paper on Charlie Glickman’s blog -
    http://www.charlieglickman.com/2011/04/when-scientists-dont-understand-sex-feminism-dominance-and-arousal – and I think it fits this discussion, too.

    Negotiating sexual politics has always been difficult, but paradoxically the laudable and necessary victories of gender equality activism might make it even more challenging. We’re all figuring out how to live in the first society in human history where women have such power, independence, and clout. But just as democracy has no effect on our basic taste preferences for sugar and fat, democracy doesn’t affect our basic sexual preferences for domination and submission.

    Gender equality activism makes negotiating sexual politics challenging because we don’t have easy roles to fall back on. When each person and each relationship requires communication about individual preferences, when there isn’t a script of how men and women are supposed to act (both among themselves and with each other), there are more variables to take into account when navigating sex. And yes, some of the difficulty has come from the insistence of some people (both within feminism and other communities) that hierarchies, sexual dominance & submission, BDSM, fantasies, and other dynamics of seemingly inequitable relationships are inherently oppressive. But what we need is gender equality activism that allows us to be fully who we are, to treat people with respect and care, and to engage in whatever sexual practices turn us on.

    Let me repeat that last sentence: “what we need is gender equality activism that allows us to be fully who we are, to treat people with respect and care, and to engage in whatever sexual practices turn us on.”

    Your opening question is reflective of that inclusive spirit, the entire series is. But I’m not so sure about AB’s statement, in that respect… Again, I may misunderstand AB – it seems AB and I have a tendency to not understand what the other is trying to say.
98. 

    Infra April 26, 2011 at 3:40 am #

    Well, one of the things that needs to be considered with LMR tactics is the possible generalization from something that isn’t actually LMR. To use the example that Sagredo originally mentioned –

    her: We shouldn’t be doing this.
    him: You’re right, we shouldn’t be doing this. [stops all touching and sexual attention]

    – one of the women I knew in the past talked about that kind of exchange during sex, but it definitely wasn’t in the context of LMR. It was “We shouldn’t be doing this. We’re going straight to Hell,” in the context of sex with her boyfriend’s best friend. He’d responded with “You’re right, we shouldn’t be doing this,” but it wasn’t a tactic; it was a turn-on for both of them, part of doing what they knew was a betrayal of someone that they both claimed to care about, but which they were enjoying anyway.

    He didn’t stop any touching or sexual attention, from what I understand, but I can see how doing so might appear to “work” as a tactic in that situation. It’s just that seeing it as LMR would be a complete misinterpretation of what was going on, and an entire group of techniques could end up being based upon that kind of error.

    I think that Sagredo’s point about how stopping (specifically, going to a full stop because one doesn’t want to cuddle, which I’ve done because I needed the cool-down) could be misinterpreted as an LMR tactic highlights a similar kind of issue.

    There is a further PUA-ish claim that I am unsure about, and that is that a firm setting of boundaries of this kind typically makes one more attractive to women as a demonstration of higher value.

    It can work that way, in my experience, though I’ve never stopped or backed off with the intention of producing that effect; it seems to relate to expectations about how much self-control men will have with respect to their own sexuality. Some women seem to regard that quite highly, but others seem to regard it as an obstacle, and respond to it as if it were a personal insult.
99. 

    Clarisse April 26, 2011 at 1:29 pm #

    @Sagredo — This pretty much reflects my own view. Stopping is not about pushing guilt or negative feelings on someone, it’s not about suggesting she’s a bad person or that she owes sex or that she is a “tease” or becoming emotionally cold or distant. It is a withdrawal from physical intimacy. It is setting a limit on physical behaviour. It’s “I like you and respect you, but I’m not interested in cuddling without sex”. It’s backing off and giving space for the woman to decide what she wants.

    Really, I think we’re coming back to intent. If you do this and your goal is honestly to preserve her comfort, then you won’t come across as manipulative or pressuring. If you do it and you’re thinking “this is just another step on the path to fucking her tonight”, then pressure is likely. It seems obvious to me that the majority of LMR tactics are LMR-busting tactics, although I admittedly have not done a comprehensive survey of resources on the matter. But the most famous examples are not about “setting boundaries”, although they sometimes use that language — they’re about getting the PUA laid tonight. Most of them don’t even pretend about it. In The Game, one chapter is called “Blast Through LMR” and it features a picture of Strauss holding a handgun.

    I have to say, I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that men are obliged to continue to be intimate when they’re no longer interested, just because a woman wants to be touched. That smells like entitlement to me.

    I think touching is the easiest and most obvious way to convince someone you still care about them in this situation. If you really don’t want to do it, then don’t, but that doesn’t mean that the next logical step is “and also turn away and check your email and turn on the lights”, which is usually what I hear when PUAs pull out this critique. (I know it’s probably not what you’re trying to do, but I just want to register disagreement with that particular slippery slope.)

    But sometimes men continue when they don’t really want to because of their own insecurities, because for instance they have internalised that they are fundamentally unworthy of sex with any woman and this is the closest they can get.

    Sure. Or because they have internalized that they will be less masculine if they turn down sex, that “real men” always want sex, etc. Acknowledged.

    @Sam — Your agreeing with this statement is a tad bit puzzling to me. Maybe I don’t understand – as always a real possibility -, but to me it either implies that AB is talking about some male sexuality that this series of threads is not about, or that there is not much need for a masculinity discussion at all, at least if it doesn’t follow the classic antagonist narrative just described by Hugh Ristik. And since you started this unusual seried of exchanges you probably don’t believe the latter.

    As far as I’m concerned, I’m all for accepting and honoring male sexuality (and all consensual sexuality). But no one’s sexuality gets to be “normal”, or at the very least, no one’s sexuality gets to be more normal than anyone else’s. I get that in some circles guys are feeling as though stereotypical male sexuality is under attack in some ways. I sympathize with that, but I still think the mainstream glorifies and centers stereotypical male sexuality, and that uncritical presentation of it feeds into that centering, like what AB was talking about with the guy who commented about how male sexuality is so undervalued and then made an entire website on sexuality that’s described as “for everyone” but is totally centered on stereotypical manliness.
100. 

     Sagredo April 26, 2011 at 4:38 pm #

     Oh I think it’s absolutely about getting laid tonight.

     The general PUA conception of LMR is that it’s usually kind of bullshitty, and that it’s based on “anti-slut defence” of self-image. This is what PUAs want to blast through. But of course, women have an absolute right to say “no” at any time as a precondition to all play.

     Stopping is, firstly, an immediate acceptance of that “no”. And it certainly is pressure. But it’s the pressure of “you can’t have what you asked for”, the pressure of frustrated desire in the face of the other’s firmly set boundary. It allows her own desire to blast through her own ASD, if that’s what it is, and lets her come to her own “yes”, if that’s what she wants.

     But maybe some women have a real urge to be liked. If that’s true, they need to own that. If a woman really wants a man she’s recently met to like her more than he already does, having sex with him can be an effective way to achieve that aim.

     Is this LMR-blasting-with-a-handgun-or-whatever unethical or manipulative? It’s a clear expression of boundaries and desires, immediate respect of “no”, and no misrepresentation of attitudes or opinion of the other.

     Of course, if a lover does show real distress, that’s a very good time to reassure her that you respect her and her decision and that you still like her.
101. 

     Sam April 27, 2011 at 2:53 am #

     Clarisse,

     “But no one’s sexuality gets to be “normal”, or at the very least, no one’s sexuality gets to be more normal than anyone else’s.”

     well, I’d say all (consensual) sexuality is equally valuable, but “normal” is also a statistical term. And in a statistical sense, there are certainly some sexualities that are more “normal” than others. Their “normality” should not exert any explicit or implicit compliance pressure, but as you noted, at least an implicit compliance pressure may be an inherent side effect of clustering.

     I get that in some circles guys are feeling as though stereotypical male sexuality is under attack in some ways.

     Sure. But this makes it sound like the main question was “how to handle male disenchantment”. I always thought that the discussion was about mutual acceptance of mutually accepted *real* issues, not imagined ones.

     I sympathize with that, but I still think the mainstream glorifies and centers stereotypical male sexuality, and that uncritical presentation of it feeds into that centering

     Or so it is suggested. Again, maybe I’m too much of an outlier to be able to “correctly” perceive reality – like suggested by k above (in general, not with respect to me personally) – but as I perceive it, male sexuality may be centered in the economy because men are more willing to consume and commodify sexuality, but for all the porn and all the naked women on the web, for all the male posturing and grand-standing, it seems to me that male sexuality is mostly shamed, particularly in relation to sexual violence. Honestly, I wish I’d come across a glorification of male sexuality when I was growing up… how is a society whose sexual attitude towards men is based on controlling it’s assumed potential sociopathy glorifying male sexuality?

     Again, maybe this is perception bias and the grass is, once again, greener on the other side. But for all the discourse about the awesomeness of the vagina, I never had the feeling there’s anyone celebrating the penis. There’s guys competing with their penises, and size matters. But how is that glorifying male sexuality?

     Maybe that’s just me, maybe that’s my personal filters, I don’t know. And as I’ve wondered numerous times, maybe my personal story is making it impossible for me to fairly evaluate my perceptions. You may be better able to decide that than I am.

     But even accepting that male sexuality is centered by society through porn and even assuming it were presented positively there, I don’t consider that a useful counterweight to all the toxic messages about male sexuality that our culture, certainly not only feminism, produces.

     So, I’m really not sure what “no uncritial presentation” of male sexuality is supposed to mean. Where is male sexuality presented uncritically? By whom? I don’t think anyone here does that. But if presenting experiences critically means that guys’ accounts of their life and experiences are not given the same epistemic value that women’s acconts are given, because of the axiomatic male privilege in life, and the corresponding female epistemic privilege in gender matters, then their telling it will be limited to venting, listening will be – intentionally – therapeutic at best, and actual understanding will be impossible.

     Should that really be the goal?
102. 

     Infra April 27, 2011 at 9:19 am #

     @Sagredo:

     Stopping is, firstly, an immediate acceptance of that “no”.

     It is, but it isn’t necessarily an acceptance, immediate or not, of the reasons for that “no.” That’s where a major part of the problem comes in, because it can produce a response of “why did he react that way?” and, as with many situations in which someone seems to have taken a statement differently than we intended, that can produce the pressure to set things right.

     Once that’s introduced, it can play upon any number of reasons for continuing.
103. 

     machina April 27, 2011 at 10:43 am #

     Hey again.

     Society mostly promotes mainstream male fantasy, and mostly does so with images of attractive women. What is presented as mainstream male fantasy isn’t actual male sexuality, and the female figures presented aren’t female sexuality either. Pick up artists are most visibly focused on trying to fix the discrepancy between the fantasies presented and the reality of many men’s, i.e. mainstream, actual sexuality by trying to live the fantasy, but the stats given upthread indicate that a large majority of men use pick up services mainly to actually have a mainstream sexuality. The attempts to produce both positive views towards women’s bodies and towards mainstream female sexuality is much more deliberate, coming from much more common disillusionment with simply being fantasy figures, but I think that they are both coming from the same discrepancies between reality and fantasy.
104. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 12:46 pm #

     It is, but it isn’t necessarily an acceptance, immediate or not, of the reasons for that “no.”

     Her reasons are her own concern. He doesn’t even know what they are when he accepts her “no”. It’s up to her to decide between her reasons and her desire.

     That’s where a major part of the problem comes in, because it can produce a response of “why did he react that way?”

     The answer is supposed to be clear. It’s that he’s not interested in continuing if this isn’t moving towards sex. And she needs to accept and respect that boundary. Yes, it can be frustrating to run against someone’s boundary.

     and, as with many situations in which someone seems to have taken a statement differently than we intended, that can produce the pressure to set things right.

     Once that’s introduced, it can play upon any number of reasons for continuing.

     The statement wasn’t taken differently than intended: she said “no” and he immediately stopped. He absolutely understands her intent. His stopping completely might not be what she intended for him to do, but there’s not supposed to be any misunderstanding.

     She needs to decide what’s right for her. If she feels the need to continue just to please him, for instance, she needs to own that desire to please.
105. 

     nathan April 27, 2011 at 1:10 pm #

     In case anyone here is interested, I started a dating and relationship blog – partly inspired by all the conversations we have had here. The first post is here.

     http://21centuryrelationships.blogspot.com/2011/04/love-of-unsettled-hearts.html

     I hope to dig into some of the more philosophical, psychological issues in the future, but the first post is quite confessional in nature.

     Thanks for reading!
106. 

     Infra April 27, 2011 at 1:39 pm #

     @Sagredo:

     Her reasons are her own concern. He doesn’t even know what they are when he accepts her “no”.

     Yes, they are her own concern (or his, as I’ve encountered women who also employ LMR tactics). However, this does not rule out the benefit of attempting to understand another’s state of mind, and it’s far from obvious that the individual employing the tactic would be unaware of what the other individual’s motivations might be; the characterization that you’re giving here is one that omits the roles played by theory of mind, subcommunication, empathy, et al., but I’m not convinced that the roles played by those elements can be omitted in any accurate evaluation of the situation.

     The answer is supposed to be clear. It’s that he’s not interested in continuing if this isn’t moving towards sex.

     If we admit the statement quoted above, then there could be no reasonable expectation that she would know this (i.e., his reasons are his own concern and she doesn’t even known what they are when he stops). OTOH, even if we admit the roles played by ToM, et al., we’re still left with the possibility of misinterpretation. Unless he states this directly, it isn’t reasonable to assume this from either position.

     The statement wasn’t taken differently than intended: she said “no” and he immediately stopped. He absolutely understands her intent.

     If he doesn’t know what her reasons are when he accepts her “no,” then there’s no way to reach this conclusion. At best, what can be said is that he understood the literal meaning of the message, and that’s a separate issue from the intention in saying it, which is precisely what I was getting at with my previous comment.

     In sum: the statements that you’re making, in combination, would suggest a position in which no insight into the mind of the other is required of or can be reasonably expected from the person employing the tactic, but that some amount of the same insight is required of and can be reasonably expected from the person experiencing it, without providing a justification for or explanation of that difference.

     With all due respect, Sagredo, I don’t think that you’re providing an argument that would produce a better view of these tactics, here. If anything, it’s a line of argument that would lend some support to viewing someone who employs them as being potentially high-risk.
107. 

     Clarisse April 27, 2011 at 3:51 pm #

     @Sagredo — She needs to decide what’s right for her. If she feels the need to continue just to please him, for instance, she needs to own that desire to please.

     Awesome! And also, I should totally flirt with men that I know, insinuate that I’m interested in them romantically in a plausibly-deniable way, convince them to buy me expensive gifts and take me out for expensive meals, and then if they have the gall to think I might have a romantic relationship with them, I should tell them “Hey, why don’t you just own your desire to please me?”

     /sarcasm

     No. Sometimes, the answer is just no. It’s not that these situations never arise accidentally — sometimes they do. It’s not that people are always callously manipulating other people — sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not. Especially when people are young or inexperienced, this stuff can happen and be nobody’s fault. But if you have more experience and more strategy at your command and you know the scripts better than your partner, it is not okay to build a situation that basically exploits those scripts in a way that YOU KNOW could end up hurting them and then say: “But you didn’t have good boundaries.”
108. 

     Clarisse April 27, 2011 at 3:54 pm #

     Sam, machina –

     both of you are very smart and say smart things. I will think about them more.
109. 

     nathan April 27, 2011 at 4:47 pm #

     “It’s not that people are always callously manipulating other people — sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not. Especially when people are young or inexperienced, this stuff can happen and be nobody’s fault. But if you have more experience and more strategy at your command and you know the scripts better than your partner, it is not okay to build a situation that basically exploits those scripts in a way that YOU KNOW could end up hurting them and then say: “But you didn’t have good boundaries.””

     This makes a lot of sense and I think a lot of men (and women) could benefit from checking their initial assumptions about anothers’ motivation or intentions. And having been on both ends of dating someone inexperienced (once when I was the inexperienced dating a much older woman, and a few times being the much older experienced man) I think these cases require special care because that younger, inexperienced person is more likely to assume you have good intentions, even if you don’t. And they also might be more likely to take gestures like buying expensive meals and gifts as signs that you’re seriously interested.
110. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 5:25 pm #

     insinuate that I’m interested in them romantically in a plausibly-deniable way,

     Hmm, this part strikes me as deceptive. Misrepresenting your own desires to hold out the promise of a romantic relationship that you have no intent of getting into isn’t all that ethical.

     Likewise, it wouldn’t be ethical to hold out the promise of a night of “just cuddling” to extract favours, and then not follow through. But I don’t think that counts as an LMR tactic.

     On the other hand, if a woman really wants to please a man by having sex with him she wouldn’t be interested in otherwise, I think that’s great. Afterwards she can say “I feel good about having pleased him” because that’s what she wanted. That’s what owning one’s desires looks like. But you know, I don’t think this is actually what LMR tactics are all about.

     Reading the PUA accounts of LMR tactics, they don’t suggest pressure to please. They work under the assumption that it’s her own desire for touch and for sex that blasts through all handgun-like her own worries about sluttiness and self-image. The PUA claim is that usually the woman really does want sex, but can’t admit it to herself for various silly reasons. It’s not about trying to manipulate someone who doesn’t have the wherewithal to say “no”, and certainly not about hurting her. It’s setting a clear boundary and giving a choice.

     Now he might have his own theories about her reasons for saying “no”, but it’s not his place to debate them or discount them. It’s entirely her choice as to how much to value those reasons in the face of her desire. She may feel frustrated about not getting what she asked for, and that he didn’t react the way she intended him to react, but she’s in a place where she can own her own reasons, her own desires, and her own decision whether to, not passively consent, but actively initiate. She’s a big girl now, she can do this.

     You know, this stuff isn’t really all that complicated. The guy is not interested in where this is going, so he stops. She has the choice to take it where he does want it to go, by actively re-initiating, and owning her own choice if that’s what she really wants, or stopping there.

     No. Sometimes, the answer is just no.

     That’s what he says, actually. She just needs to accept that she’s not entitled to his touch, and make up her mind.
111. 

     Clarisse April 27, 2011 at 5:43 pm #

     I had a random sample of people I in a co-op I visited (none of whom actively identify as feminist) read the Love Systems section on freeze-outs the other day. They were ALL appalled. One described it as “just an awful thing to do to someone”. Etc.

     When I first read the section on freeze-outs, I had to think about it for a while as I worked out my feelings, and I showed it to my then-boyfriend. He reacted much more strongly than I had and compared it to tactics like “love bombing”, used by certain cults to manipulate their members.

     I have read other accounts of PUAs by people I have never spoken to, that focused on freeze-outs as an example of how manipulative and screwed up PUA tactics can be.

     Freeze-outs are not something only feminists react badly to, they are not a harmless quirk of a genuinely nice boundary-setting PUA, they are a TACTIC that MANY people immediately recognize as problematic.

     There are other LMR tactics that are less coldly aggressive. Those, I have less of a problem with. But the freeze-out exemplifies the most fucked up approach to LMR, the most fucked up attitude on the part of PUAs, and often (when problems with it are described) the continued refusal of most PUAs to acknowledge other people’s reality. As long as the freeze-out remains a popular and often central LMR pattern, you are never going to be able to convince me that PUAs are not callously manipulating their partners in a way that they have good reason to think the partners may not like, a non-negligible portion of the time.
112. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 6:18 pm #

     What does Love Systems say?
113. 

     Clarisse April 27, 2011 at 6:36 pm #

     Hugh Ristik talks about the Love Systems LMR stuff and quotes it here:
     http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/23/ethical-pick-up-artistry/#comment-40007

     I responded briefly 120 comments later (sorry):
     http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/23/ethical-pick-up-artistry/#comment-43776
114. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 7:13 pm #

     Ah, as usual Hugh is more perceptive and nuanced than me. LS says:

     Candles, incense, dim lights, mood music – all gone.

     I guess this depends on how it’s done, but this could come off as a bit petulant.

     After all, you like her and you enjoy her company. Let her know this.

     Quite.

     Then do something else – ideally something boring. Check your email. Play “go fish” with a deck of cards.

     Now these are two different things, one that involves her and one that doesn’t. The trouble with checking email is that it’s active involvement in things other than her, so it’s like a rejection. Go Fish is good, though. Sure, it’s teasing to do something deliberately boring, but he’s right there engaged with her, just not in the way she wants.

     Taking a shower is good too, because that’s more a temporary break while she stews in her unmet desire, which is totally hot, and she has the option of joining him.
115. 

     Lathe of Heaven April 27, 2011 at 8:23 pm #

     Replying (mostly) to Sagredo at #110, but related to others as well:

     I’m not and have never been a PUA, but if I understand their literature then I think there’s a point you’re missing in the mechanism of the “freeze-out” counter to the LMR hurdle. This will also go a ways toward illustrating Clarisse’s point about not wanting or needing to appreciate other people’s experience.

     The PUA worldview, as I understand it, is quite simple: (i) A man is defined as “attractive” if women in general, and particularly the woman of his interest of the moment, want to have sex with him; (ii) If those women don’t want to have sex with him, then he should do something to make himself more attractive to them (what evo-psych/bio people would call preening or displaying). If the woman of the moment doesn’t actively want to have sex with him in what you would describe as the LMR situation, then what can he do that will increase his attractiveness in that moment?

     The uttermost bedrock of PUAdom is the idea that the least attractive quality a man can display is not any kind of meanness or selfishness, but eagerness or neediness. This comprises a short, fundamental description of female sexual psychology — note that I’m not endorsing it or agreeing with it, just naming it as the PUA touchstone. So, in PUA thinking it is always worth considering a move that will demonstrate the opposite of neediness most directly.

     In the case of the LMR situation, the way to demonstrate the opposite of neediness is to say “OK, I don’t need you, and I won’t be crushed or disappointed if you want to stop; I have desire but I don’t have need.” It seems to me that demonstrating this is a fair description of what the “freeze-out” is supposed to accomplish. In pure PUA-think, this display of anti-neediness raises the mans’ attractiveness in the woman’s eyes, after which she is more motivated to take the initiative for sex.

     This is not the whole story, of course; but in PUA-land I do think the “raising one’s value” mechanism is part of the logic of the freeze-out response; it’s really one of a whole stable of “aloofness maintenance” techniques that derive from the same core PUA principle.
116. 

     Scootah April 27, 2011 at 8:39 pm #

     @Sagredo

     They work under the assumption that it’s her own desire for touch and for sex that blasts through all handgun-like her own worries about sluttiness and self-image.

     Yeah, but does that really wash? The freezeout thing seems to me much more like a manipulation of people’s insecurity and need for acceptance/attention than a manipulation of their lust and desire.

     Yes, the women who go along with the Freeze Out nonsense are big girls who have every power to say no, and tell the PUA running that game to go fuck himself then. And I applaud anyone with enough self awareness/self confidence to do so. But I think the reality is that this tactic isn’t about letting lust drive horny people to move past their anti-slut defences – it’s about manipulating people’s insecurities and need for acceptance to herd them toward something they don’t want, or at least weren’t ready for yet.

     It feels like a very deliberately constructed microcosm of teen peer pressure – where you’re only cool if you’ll shoplift a soda for us. No you don’t have to, but you can’t hang out with us if you’re not cool.

     Human nature is vulnerable to that sort of bullying/manipulation and human nature is to recast the events after the fact so that we don’t feel like suckers for going along with it. Nobody wants to mentally review those events and think ‘wow, I’m so insecure that I whored myself for attention from a douche in a furry top hat’. We just recast those events, or don’t dwell on them to maintain our self view as strong willed and intelligent who won’t be bullied.
117. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 8:41 pm #

     Lathe, I alluded to this at the end of #96. I think you’re probably right.
118. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 8:44 pm #

     it’s about manipulating people’s insecurities and need for acceptance to herd them toward something they don’t want, or at least weren’t ready for yet.

     I’m not seeing this in, for instance, the Love Systems piece Clarisse pointed to.

     After all, you like her and you enjoy her company. Let her know this.
119. 

     Scootah April 27, 2011 at 10:31 pm #

     @Sagredo – I’m not sure that the pretty words wrapped around the ugly idea change the mechanics of what’s going on. Even if the original idea of freeze outs was intended to be puppies and sunshine, I think the reason that it works is quite dark and cold.

     And while I’m not at all confident that good intentions were ever in place around the freeze outs concept, all the good intentions in the world don’t make manipulative bullying any less awful.
120. 

     Infra April 27, 2011 at 10:43 pm #

     @Lathe of Heaven:

     In the case of the LMR situation, the way to demonstrate the opposite of neediness is to say “OK, I don’t need you, and I won’t be crushed or disappointed if you want to stop; I have desire but I don’t have need.” It seems to me that demonstrating this is a fair description of what the “freeze-out” is supposed to accomplish.

     I’d agree that it’s a fair description of what the freeze-out aims to accomplish, but it’s questionable whether or not it actually achieves that. To use the Love Systems description as an example, the use of a boring game such as “go fish” communicates something different from playing an interesting game, such as poker or gin; if the PUA weren’t needy, or overly invested in the outcome, would there be much of a reason to focus on a game that’s unlikely to hold someone’s interest?

     Seems to me that doing this communicates the opposite of “After all, you like her and you enjoy her company,” because boring games aren’t the kind of thing that’s likely to keep someone involved and engaged; a part of communicating that one is enjoying someone else’s company is doing things that are likely to keep them around. But boring things tend to make people look elsewhere, and what doing this communicates is that the game’s been selected in order to redirect attention back to sex by providing an unattractive option, and that’s something that’s likely to come off as needy, not as its opposite — as an attempt to appear detached from the outcome when the PUA is, to the contrary, heavily invested.
121. 

     Lathe of Heaven April 27, 2011 at 11:22 pm #

     an attempt to appear detached from the outcome when the PUA is, to the contrary, heavily invested.

     To me, as an observer, this always seemed to be the fatal flaw in PUA-dom: the pose is one of power, control and aloofness, but it’s all in the service of catering to exactly what women (really, actually; just not nominally) what to see in a man. The accomplished PUA has really made himself a complete serf to women’s value system, the same one that he professes to disrespect; must cause some serious cognitive problems, I guess.

     There’s really a profound clue here, I think. Old-fashioned masculine men traditionally sought to obtain the approval / respect / obedience / deference / etc. of other men. Gaining the desire of women was a pleasant secondary effect, but the masculine man’s self-satisfaction or “score” was primarily determined by what other men thought of him. The PUA’s are in stark contrast: their “score” is entirely determined by women’s opinions, and in their PUA occupation they have almost no life among other men at all, beyond sharing field notes and comparing notch counts.

     For all that PUA’s and feminists are said to be antagonists, it seems to me that their value systems really have a lot of overlap, beginning with the rejection of old-fashioned masculinity (though not ending there…).
122. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 11:29 pm #

     Infra, I think there’s actually a qualitative rather than quantitative difference between want and need. “Need”, in this unattractive sense at least, is not just a large amount of “want”. I think a teasingly boring game of Go Fish is an excellent way of expressing want rather than need. Here’s Momus on the difference.
123. 

     Sagredo April 27, 2011 at 11:57 pm #

     Lathe, I think it’s Roissy, in one of his less cynical moments, who says “make your mission, not your woman, your priority”. Even then, many of the OP criticisms of the PUA community apply.

     But for those who are more trusting in the basic goodness of women, congruence is the essential trait, perhaps even before dominance. It simply means what you express is who you are. The ideal here is a man who feels good about himself and has reason to, and expresses it naturally. He wants women, and doesn’t hide it, but isn’t needy or desperate about it.

     The PUA community has a great deal of criticism of the sexual/romantic values they believe that women profess, not of the values they believe women actually have. I suspect the difference is rather exaggerated, and that the values they hear and the values they observe are often coming from different sets of women.
124. 

     Ali m April 28, 2011 at 2:03 am #

     Is there any generalization of pickup-as-social/romantic-skills to people who aren’t men interacting with women? Because I could see that a) being helpful for people who aren’t straight men and b) being a good contribution to the death of gender norms, including the ones that make men the pursuers. I (female) haven’t got more than a bit of an idea how to approach a man or a woman as a person I am sexually interested in without being awkward, making an ass of myself, or walking all over boundaries.

     If pickup *is* just a male-only thing and can’t ever be generalized, that strikes me as maybe more tellingly problmeatic than a discussion of LMR tactics or whatever (assuming, of course, that one wants both genders to be equally “allowed” to do most things).
125. 

     Sagredo April 28, 2011 at 2:19 am #

     Ali, hearing about “female PUAs” makes the PUA community go all breathless. It’s like the ultimate validation of their stuff.
126. 

     Ali m April 28, 2011 at 2:25 am #

     @Sagredo #110 — I think the time to establish that as an actual boundary is around the time cuddling starts, so it doesn’t end up coming across as a bait-and-switch or a punishment for her not putting out. The woman starts cuddling on you, you murmur a sexy proposition in her ear and either she’s not interested (in which case you stop, before you hit *her* boundary for the night), or you go somewhere more private and make out/fool around/fuck.
127. 

     Infra April 28, 2011 at 2:35 am #

     @Sagredo:

     I agree about the difference between want and need. What I’m having some difficulty wrapping my head around is this:

     I think a teasingly boring game of Go Fish is an excellent way of expressing want rather than need.

     How does that work, exactly?

     The most charitable impression that something like that would give me is that, aside from sex, they can’t think of anything worthwhile to do; and if we’d done interesting things earlier on, it would be obvious that choosing to do something boring was an intentional tactic for trying to get back to getting laid.

     Both would suggest that they were preoccupied with having sex, maybe even to the point of being desperate — and that would definitely suggest need, not want.

     @Ali m:

     Can’t say that I’ve come across anyone who’s attempted to generalize it, but I have been in a situation in which the woman who approached me did things in a way that was strongly reminiscent of M3 Model-/Mehow-style outer game (including DHV spiking and false time constraints). I didn’t start to make the connection until after she’d started on kino, and I wouldn’t conclude from it that she’d studied pickup materials, but there were definite, strong similarities in both technique and sequence.

     That ended up being one of the most comfortable interactions of that kind that I’ve had (the others were brutally uncomfortable, when they weren’t just awkward), so it’s led me to believe that the techniques can be generalized. It’s just that I haven’t come across anyone who’s explicitly acknowledged exploring that possibility.
128. 

     Scootah April 28, 2011 at 2:39 am #

     @Ali – A lot of guys would argue that every episode of Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Girlfriend, and every other womens magazine in the history of magazines aimed primarily at women is infact a pickup guide for heterosexual women.

     Sex and the City, and a large portion of Oprah shows could well be classed in the same vein.

     Lots of those information sources are also awful, and are far more vitriolic in their classification of all men as horny morons who’ll hump anything that wears high heels and cheat on anything that doesn’t read the latest episode of Cleo… but we’re talking about awful PUA advice at the moment.

     Advice for non heterosexual women who might want to pick up – is much harder to find. Partly because Lesbians have a lot of prejudice towards bisexual women or women who aren’t invovled in the Lesbian community… for reasons that are somewhat understandable. But it does make life a bit difficult for women who are exploring that side of their sexuality for the first time.

     There are lots of gay youth focused publications that provide a lot of context on things like flagging and terminology (If you meet a woman who’s got grey and black hankies hanging out of her left pocket and self identifies as stone butch – most human beings would have no fucking idea what any of that meant without a lot of reading or exposure to the community first). A lot of material is cross community applicable – so checking out gay mens stuff can be helpful.

     In my experience, which is all purely observational (I’m a dude, I just have lots of female friends who are into girls) – the easiest way to pick up a girl, is to have an iphone and install Crusher. Other than that, any advice a guy gives you is speculative in the extreme.
129. 

     Sagredo April 28, 2011 at 3:04 am #

     Ali, isn’t the start of cuddling is a bit early for sexy propositions?

     Infra, playing Go Fish is supposed to be teasing. It’s prolonging unmet sexual desire for erotic effect. She wants him, but can’t have him so easily. In fact he should make her finish the hand even if she does go for him.
130. 

     Ali m April 28, 2011 at 3:10 am #

     @Scootah

     A lot of guys would argue that every episode of Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Girlfriend, and every other womens magazine in the history of magazines aimed primarily at women is infact a pickup guide for heterosexual women.

     It’s true, but I think a lot of that advice — inasmuch as I’ve read it — is about making yourself so attractive/whatever that the man will make moves on you. There are ways to signal your interest, but no ways to go beyond signaling to transparently and assertively saying “Hey, I find you extremely attractive and would like to do sexy things with you.” In the case of non-het women trying to pick up women, it’s even worse — a lot of the things that are “flirting” with a guy are just the stuff you do with your friends. Female and some mixed-gender friendsgroups admit a lot of physical interaction without implied sexual attraction, and so there has to be a way to state clearly that you ARE sexually interested before you fall into the realm of potential creep by taking someone’s friendship as a sexual interaction.
131. 

     DFL April 28, 2011 at 5:37 am #

     Lathe of Heaven (#115):

     In the case of the LMR situation, the way to demonstrate the opposite of neediness is to say “OK, I don’t need you, and I won’t be crushed or disappointed if you want to stop; I have desire but I don’t have need.” It seems to me that demonstrating this is a fair description of what the “freeze-out” is supposed to accomplish.

     With some of the PUA tactics, such as LMR tactics, I also have the feeling that there is a difference in the reasons why they supposedly work that are sold to PUA followers as opposed to the reasons why they actually work.

     In the case of LMR busting, the reason that is sold is “display non-neediness”, while the actual reason is playing on her insecurities.
     But they can’t openly say that because most PUA followers aren’t assholes of that caliber and might not accept these tactics.

     Same with e.g. the “neg”.

     So, in a way, PUA seems to be manipulative towards both the women targets and the male customers.
132. 

     Hugh Ristik April 28, 2011 at 6:48 am #

     DFL said:

     In the case of LMR busting, the reason that is sold is “display non-neediness”, while the actual reason is playing on her insecurities.
     But they can’t openly say that because most PUA followers aren’t assholes of that caliber and might not accept these tactics.

     Wait a sec, how do we know what the PUA gurus think is the “actual reason?” Maybe the gurus, just like the students, aren’t complete assholes (at least, not in that way) and prefer to think that their teachings have a positive impact on women. Different women are different, the mechanism for certain techniques working might vary. PUAs (gurus or not) might understand some of these mechanisms, but not others.

     Rather than saying that the gurus are deceiving their followers, it’s much more likely that they are deceiving themselves… and what’s even more likely is that they are simply ignorant of the ways that some women might react to their techniques. Never underestimate the power of ignorance, self-deception, generalization, and bias.

     It’s more likely that the gurus are biased true believers who are sincere, and who want to believes that their teachings are positive for all women… rather than having covert and knowing malice in their techniques that they hide from their followers.
133. 

     Hugh Ristik April 28, 2011 at 6:52 am #

     Clarisse said:

     Sure. But one way to think about this (which I picked up from a D/s discussion group at San Francisco’s Citadel) is that you want to withdraw sexuality without withdrawing intimacy.

     I think you managed to say what I was trying to say a bit more concisely. And I think I was having trouble saying it because I’d always just assumed that even with a freeze-out, the goal wasn’t to break the intimacy. Because deliberately breaking rapport after someone refuses you sex seems like a jerk move.

     I think this is yet another example of how the descriptions of many PUA techniques are ambiguous, and different people construe them in different ways. Someone like me or Sagredo takes the standpoint of “could I implement this in a way that would be positive for both people?” Whereas you seem to take the standpoint of “could this be implemented in a way that could be harmful to me or someone else?”

     Personally, I think there isn’t any contradiction in saying that the Love Systems LMR advice gets a “yes” for both questions. Nothing in their advice about breaks (remember, they dumped the term “freeze outs”) necessarily means breaking the rapport or intimacy. Expect perhaps one: removing candles or music. This is actually the “taking a break” tactic that bothers me the most; I agree with Sam that it easily risks looking petulant. In contrast, it’s not at all difficult to imagine excusing yourself to check your email for a few minutes in a way that maintains intimacy.

     Freeze-outs are not something only feminists react badly to, they are not a harmless quirk of a genuinely nice boundary-setting PUA, they are a TACTIC that MANY people immediately recognize as problematic.

     I have trouble reconciling this with what you wrote above. I agree with you that PUAs don’t conceptualize “freeze outs” as boundary setting (though I think they should think a lot more about their own boundaries). The thing is, “freeze out” is a horrible term that actually encompasses a lot of very different behaviors. If you believe (as you suggest above), that it’s possible to take a break without breaking the intimacy, then you accept a behavior that PUAs would categorize as a subtle “freeze out.”

     There are other LMR tactics that are less coldly aggressive.

     That’s one possible interpretation of the tactic, but it’s really not the only one. If you want to say that “freeze outs,” as currently described, will often be implemented with coldness or aggression, I would completely agree: the language used to describe them may encourage such attitudes.

     However, if you are saying that “freeze outs” literally require coldness and aggression, then I would absolutely disagree, and I think you would need a lot more quoting to make such a case… especially considering that some descriptions of the tactic say to not act angry at all.

     I read your update to the OP, and I’m going to have to point out that it’s still got some inaccuracies:

     If they’re playing a card game, he packs up the cards.

     No tactic actually advises this; the actual tactic is to start playing cards, not to pack them up. That’s different.

     Basically, he goes cold and ignores her until she agrees to have sex with him.

     That’s not what the advice literally says. The Love System’s advice is check your email for a few minutes. That’s miles away from ignoring someone until they have sex with you.

     Here is Mystery’s description of “freeze outs” (from his book, p. 203):

     If last-minute resistance seems insurmountable, do a freeze-out: Turn on the light, snuff out the candle, check your e-mail, head to the kitchen to make a sandwich, or pull out a checkerboard and challenge her to a game. The power of this is in its sincere delivery. If you were sulking or angry, that would show that you were affected. Just act as if your arousal circuitry has simply been shut off.

     - snuffing out the candle: I’m not a fan, for reasons explained above.
     - checking email or making a sandwich: fine, as long as he doesn’t break rapport
     - checkers: potentially fun way of taking a break

     Nowhere does he say to ignore her until she agrees to sex. Nowhere does he advise being cold and aggressive. If you’re getting that notion from something PUAs have written, then I’d like to see the quotes; otherwise, what PUAs actually say, and your interpretation of it, are getting too hard to separate.

     Mystery explicitly says that you should sincerely show a lack of anger or sulking. He then says “just act” like your arousal circuitry has been shut off. So is he insincere that you should be sincere? Is he encouraging merely a performance of sincerity? Or is he encouraging you to cultivate the ability to shut off your arousal circuitry upon resistance, so you will then be able to demonstrate that sincerely?

     Who knows. Only Mystery knows, and I’m not sure even he does. But either way, his description of the technique is significantly different from your interpretation, even though it has problems of its own (e.g. it might result in guys acting passive-aggressive when they implement it, even though it clearly says that you should be sincere).

     Mystery concludes:

     She will feel the sense of loss and will allow herself to raise her LMR threshold level

     The question is: the loss of what? Loss of affection? That would be fucked up… but it’s not necessarilyy what he says. Loss of attention? Maybe, but the checkers example still involves attention. Loss of sexual contact? It’s perfectly reasonable for the guy to stop sexual contact altogether if she refuses something. If the loss of sexual contact makes her realize that she was enjoying it, and that she wants it to escalate, then that sounds positive.

     Notice that “allow herself to raise her LMR threshold” could imply agency on her part.

     As usual, the language is ambiguous, and what sort of “loss” he means, and how it motivates the woman, really influences the ethics of this technique. I kind of want to go kick Mystery for being so ambiguous so we have to have these endless debates over what he meant, where everyone is so sure of their own interpretation. I disagree with Scootah that we can intuit some “real” meaning under these words, or that if we can, the more cynical interpretation is more likely to be “true.” We just don’t know.

     Back to your older post:

     the freeze-out is not just mentioned in Love Systems. It’s also mentioned in other places, including The Game

     I completely agree with you that many of the descriptions of “freeze outs” are problematic for various reasons (including many that I’ve already pointed out, and a few that I haven’t mentioned). What I disagree with is some of the particular problems you describe with them, such as aggression, coldness, or intentional calculation to take advantage of someone’s vulnerabilities. All of those outcomes are possible in implementations of this tactic, but I do not see those things literally suggested by either your Strauss quote, Mystery, or Love Systems.

     You’re welcome to your interpretation, but your original post doesn’t really distinguish between what PUA texts actually advise, and your interpretation of the meaning and consequences of that advice. If you have some other sources that are leading to your interpretation, then I would love to see them, and I think they would be helpful for your future writing on the subject.

     How does Strauss know that she wants to have sex and just wants him to call her later?

     I agree with you that PUAs ideas about the range of motives for women refusing sex is narrower than what is in these quotes on LMR. Elsewhere I’ve seen PUAs suggest more reasons, but LMR tactics tend to be linked to the theory of ASD, which only describes one sort of motive. I agree that this is a gap in the typical PUA understanding of women’s experience.

     In this scenario, Strauss actually does have reason to believe that she might want to have sex, because he describes her “whining ‘no’” when he withdraws. What I don’t like was his response, which was to tell her to take off her pants. I think a little more confirmation of her desire for sex should be required for such a bold order.

     But the freeze-out exemplifies the most fucked up approach to LMR, the most fucked up attitude on the part of PUAs, and often (when problems with it are described) the continued refusal of most PUAs to acknowledge other people’s reality.

     Wait, really? Other LMR tactics bother me much more than even the worst-case implementations of “freeze outs.” I am far more worried about the tactics that agree with supposedly “token” resistance and keep going, and I think these tactics are much more potentially harmful.

     It’s interesting how some of things you have problems with, I don’t see as so problematic, and some of the stuff you don’t mention (or don’t focus on so much), I have problems with.

     If you don’t mind me providing a hypothesis, it seems like “freeze outs” trigger you a lot, based on what you’ve said about a past version of yourself being potentially vulnerable to them, which leads you to react more strongly to them than to other LMR tactics that (I think) are more problematic, and to focus on the worst possible interpretation of what “freeze outs” could mean. If you’re not open to that sort of hypothesis, then I won’t make one like that again, and I apologize in advance if it’s inappropriate.

     As for me, it is still educational hearing about what the worst case scenarios could be, because I hadn’t really even considered that guys might actually break rapport intentionally in response to refusal of sex, because I personally can’t imagine myself responding that way, and the very idea seems monstrous. I just want to separate what the original advice says from the ways that it could be pulled off. I think part of the reason some PUAs are mystified by ethical criticisms is because they’ve taken the ambiguity of the original texts, and come up with their own sanitized and positive interpretations.
134. 

     Hugh Ristik April 28, 2011 at 6:56 am #

     Infra said:

     I’d agree that it’s a fair description of what the freeze-out aims to accomplish, but it’s questionable whether or not it actually achieves that.

     Exactly, I agree that there can be a gap between the theory and the actual results.

     To use the Love Systems description as an example, the use of a boring game such as “go fish” communicates something different from playing an interesting game, such as poker or gin

     It’s not the game that makes the situation interesting or boring, it’s the emotional communication. A simple, “boring” game could be an excellent way to give something to do, while they both assess what they want. You don’t want anything too mentally taxing or skill-loaded, because both people have stuff to process.

     PUAs are used to taking mundane things and making them emotionally engaging, so it’s absolutely not true that Go Fish has to be boring (though it’s probably going to be more boring that continuing to mess around). Furthermore, I like Sagredo’s interpretation of the game as flirtatious.

     As usual, the tactic is ambiguous, and we can spend all day thinking up different implementations and different scenarios.

     But boring things tend to make people look elsewhere, and what doing this communicates is that the game’s been selected in order to redirect attention back to sex by providing an unattractive option, and that’s something that’s likely to come off as needy, not as its opposite — as an attempt to appear detached from the outcome when the PUA is, to the contrary, heavily invested.

     Maybe. But what are the other options? I did a run-down of options in another comment, but basically, taking a break to play a game (even a break intentionally calculated to increase the other person’s chances of wanting to have sex) still looks attractive compared to many of the other options. For instance, continuing to make out or cuddle can also look needy, and the person who just refused something will have to wonder: is the other person trying to turn the making out or cuddling into something more?

     Basically, if you try to initiate and you get refused, then you are in a double bind: if you keep cuddling or making out, you risk looking needy. If you try to take a break and do something non-sexual, then you also risk looking needy.
135. 

     Hugh Ristik April 28, 2011 at 7:06 am #

     I’m not sure what is the correct standard for how to deal with rejection without risking triggering the other person’s people-pleasing motives, but I do feel like there is a currently a double-standard based on gender.

     If I have to dash a woman’s hopes of sex or of a relationship with me, I don’t expect her to be all zen about it. In fact, the very notion seems ludicrous. I’ve gone out with someone who got visibly upset when I resisted classifying us as “officially dating” on about the 4th date (and the 1st outside a club, which was a little soon for me, even though I liked her). She clearly wasn’t worrying about guilting me into something I didn’t want. Should she have?

     I’m willing to meet a higher ethical bar than what women meet with me, but I have to say that the double standard is surreal and feels extremely unfair. If I’m dealing with rejection, I need to watch out for her feelings and suppress my own. If she’s dealing with rejection… then same thing: it’s me who needs to watch out for her feelings and suppress my own.

     Generally whenever I’ve rejected a woman, she’s been visibly upset in some way, even if she was trying to hide it. In some cases, I wasn’t a fan of how she expressed it, but in general, I wasn’t expecting women to give me a cuddle and tell me it was OK that I was rejecting them, and how much they respected my right to do so!

     Heck, it’s considered acceptable for women to break down in tears at any sort of sexual or romantic objection, and nobody ever worries about the guy feeling guilty or giving in out of “people-pleasing.” And yet if a woman rejects me sexually, I’m supposed to be Mr. Zen Stoic Guy because of her hypothetically going along with something while non-obviously not being into it.

     And the thing is, I pretty much am that guy now. But in some circumstances, a part of me is not happy about being rejected, at least for a couple minutes, even though I respect her right to do so and don’t want her to do anything with me that she isn’t enthusiastic about. I’ve learned to suppress my emotional reaction and watch out for her… but maybe that’s not always healthy. I would like to see a world where we don’t expect men to be stoic about rejection, but where women don’t take any negative emotional reactions from men to create some sort of obligation for them.

     There appears to be a double standard now. I’m not sure which side of it should be the norm (how men are expected to react to rejection, or how women are expected to react to rejection), or something in between, but I would like to see this double standard go away.
136. 

     DFL April 28, 2011 at 7:12 am #

     Hugh Ristik:

     Rather than saying that the gurus are deceiving their followers, it’s much more likely that they are deceiving themselves… and what’s even more likely is that they are simply ignorant of the ways that some women might react to their techniques. Never underestimate the power of ignorance, self-deception, generalization, and bias.

     Yeah, maybe that is true. At least it’s the simpler hypothesis.

     I guess my point is that I don’t find it so useful to explain over and over again how it is supposed to work, but maybe rather think about whether the mechanism that is assumed is in fact the one that is in play.
137. 

     Sam April 28, 2011 at 10:33 am #

     Clarisse -

     re: glorification of male sexuality -

     Hugo Schwyzer, on Tuesday:

     “We live in a world that is deeply suspicious of male desire. Rightly so, I think.”

     http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/how-to-stare-at-women
138. 

     AB April 28, 2011 at 11:35 am #

     @Hugh Ristik:

     Sagredo said:

     AB, I don’t mind similar behaviour assigned to a similarity in gender. But there is a toxic line of thought that runs men and women are the same except for social effects, so when they behave differently, the male behaviour is wrong.

     AB said:

     That doesn’t happen. What does happen is that female behaviour is criticised all the time, including (perhaps especially) by feminists, but every time the same happens to men, people resort to the old cliché about men not being allowed to be men, as if improving themselves is some betrayal of who they are as a sex.

     Without you presenting more of your reasoning about why you disagree with Sagredo, it looks like you are dismissing him.

     In a way, I am. I’ve written repeatedly, in details, about my opinions and my reasoning for them, and often included links and concrete examples to go with it. But why am I supposed to contribute all that in response to something which is basically just stating yet again that men are oppressed without any support behind it?

     I’m a bit of a tomboy, the kind of girl who prefers AC/DC to Beyonce, who’s not opposed to walking 8 kilometres home alone at night (in heavy flat boots and a leather jacket), and who knows the rules to D&D better than boys, and I know a lot about how masculine qualities are appreciated (and not). And even as a girl, where a lot of boyish behaviour is interpreted in the most negative way (rude, slobbish, hostile), there’s no line of thought that when men and women behave differently, the male behaviour is wrong.

     Quite the contrary, save for the increased expectations of politeness, cleanliness (e.g. shaving in places men don’t shave), and ‘taking care of yourself’ (e.g. makeup, long nails, painful shoes), I often get praised for my supposedly male qualities, and this hasn’t changed as I’ve gotten older. Even the words, in both Danish and English, are more positive in regards to girls who behave like boys than boys who behave like girls.

     Now, I agree with you that the “men not being allowed to be men” meme is B.S. I don’t agree with Strauss bringing it up in his interview. I think his point was about women trying to change men in relationships. In that case, his real beef is with people trying to change their partners. If he believes that women do this more often, then he should complain about women trying to turn men into projects, rather than women “not allowing men to be men.”

     And funny enough, a lot of the PUA techniques he write about are made to change women, and make them behave the way men want them to. But it’s not so much the staggering hypocrisy that bothers me, it’s that claims like these come without any form of support, or even just examples of what people are talking about.

     In this thread, and threads like it, there is a steady stream of remarks that loosely translate into “men aren’t allowed to be men”, like Sagredo’s claim that when men and women’s behaviour differ, the male behaviour is considered wrong. And they seem to expect their words to be taken face value, in a way I certainly don’t see my claims (or those of any other female poster, now that I think about it) be.

     Wait, which men are you talking about? I think that most of the men here feel that both male and female sexuality encounter lack of appreciation, in different contexts. These threads just happen to mostly focused on lack of appreciation towards male sexuality.

     I’m not sure there’s actually a recognition here (let alone among PUAs) of how female sexuality is rarely appreciated. Sometimes, I’m not even even sure there’s a recognition of female sexuality to begin with.

     Can’t it be both? Couldn’t there be oppression both towards women who don’t feel uncomfortable expressing their sexuality, and towards men who then missing on women exploring their sexuality with them? I haven’t seen men here saying anything contradicting this interpretation.

     It could, but not when those men simultaneously want to be appreciated for using techniques that make me uncomfortable exploring my sexuality, and want to be pitied because I’m not there to explore my sexuality with them.

     Now you are going somewhere I’m not willing to follow you. Saying that women have worse sex than men isn’t just a claim about women’s experience, it’s also a claim about men’s. It’s possible that you are correct, but I’m not going to accept assertions like this as a condition for discussion, nor am I marginalizing your experience if I’m skeptical of this claim.

     I’m referring back to when Sam said men would rather have bad sex than no sex, but women wouldn’t. His interpretation was that sex was a bigger urge for men, my interpretation was that bad sex for women was so unbelievably bad that it is beyond what most men can imagine. From what I recall, the one male poster who could relate had been in an abusive relationship, though I could be wrong.

     Because you know how sexually repressed men feel. Pardon me for not getting on board with this sort of oppression olympics. If you wanted to present this as a hypothesis, then I would be open to it, but I’m not OK with you just asserting it.

     Most men I’ve heard ask for advice or talk about their sexuality being repressed (including the vast majority of PUA material) have had concerns in the range of “I feel good about my own sexuality and have no problems getting sexually aroused or feeling safe, but I need willing holes to stick my dick in”. Or in other words, if women just made themselves more sexually available, most male sexual concerns would disappear. Even the guys who complain about being called creeps are often more concerned with how (they think) that label prevents them from getting laid than any negative effect it has on their libido.

     The vast majority women I’ve heard ask for advice or talk about their sexuality being repressed have had concerns in the range of “I’m afraid, sex hurts, I can’t get sexually aroused, I hate my body” etc., or in other words, actual problems with their own sexuality, not just a lack of suitable partners.

     I’m a lot more sympathetic to this claim, because it’s more measurable. There is evidence that women are judged more on their appearance.

     It’s not just that women are judged more on their looks, it’s also that they’re judged a lot more sexually, period. I remember a guy being interviewed about what he thought about allowing topless women in swimming halls (public indoor pools), and he answered that it would offend his modesty, because some of those women would be old. In the same way, I’ve experienced guys going crazy over some unsexy woman, as if it was a personal insult against them. Not even the ugliest man in the world can inspire just half the outrage of a moderately ugly woman, unless that man is gay.

     The difference here is not just that men think physically unattractive women are unsexy, because I think the same about old men. If I imagine old men in sexual context, the first things that spring to mind is how many of them have bloated, almost pregnant-looking bellies, slightly saggy breasts, and body-hair which goes really badly with the overall (ugly) female shape of their body. But I generally don’t think that way, because I don’t go around passing sexual judgement on people unless they belong to a category I’m actually sexually interested in.

     This kind of disgust is dependant on seeing the recipient in a sexual context. Your mother isn’t disgusting, but sex with your mother is (for you). A man generally isn’t disgusting, but a gay man can easily be (to men who see him in a sexual context they wouldn’t see straight men in). And in this case, the breasts of an old man (no matter how saggy) are not disgusting enough to require the law to cover up, but the breasts of a creature belonging to the category that straight men find potentially sexually interesting need to be firm and young, lest they disgust. It’s one thing to know that getting old or gaining weight means you’ll not be considered as sexually attractive to most people as before, it’s another thing entirely if it means you’ll be considered an offence against nature, especially if you engage in sexual activities.

     Well, my experience differs. Guys in the top 10% of attractiveness seem to do quite well, but short of that, being above-average in looks is no guarantee of dating success.

     Perhaps my sample group consists of more guys who actually socialise with girls (though not on an equal basis), or perhaps I just recall being corrected in the creep thread when I talked about how guys could socialise with girls and was told that for most of them, just getting to talk to girls was problem enough, but in my experience, the significance actual women place on looks stands in sharp contrast to the lengths many men will go to to make it about something else, which again is contradicted in how they then complain that good looking men are treated better by women.

     These guys are confused. But I hope you realize that plenty of men can make the same complaints without aiming for women who are vastly more conventionally attractive.

     They probably can, it just rarely happens. We have these crazy cultural norms where men complain about not being found attractive enough by women, while doing very little to improve their appearance, and women complain about unwanted sexual attention while going to sick lengths in order to look sexy enough. The whole thing is justified by women supposedly not caring about appearance and men supposedly not caring about women except in terms of appearance, and every time something appears to support that notion, it’s reported widely and mentioned repeatedly. But every time reality contradicts it (due to men and women being surprisingly similar as sexes, and surprisingly diverse as individuals), someone has to make up a BS theory about male sexuality not being appreciated enough.
139. 

     Sagredo April 28, 2011 at 2:36 pm #

     In this thread, and threads like it, there is a steady stream of remarks that loosely translate into “men aren’t allowed to be men”, like Sagredo’s claim that when men and women’s behaviour differ, the male behaviour is considered wrong.

     This is something I see specifically behind criticisms of male behaviour coming from a social constructionist background, and perhaps often from those who consider the sexes to be “surprisingly similar”.
140. 

     AB April 28, 2011 at 3:35 pm #

     @nathan:

     I agree with this in general; I’ve seen this kind of derail over and over again. But I fail to see how it applies to this particular thread. I’m not seeing the men here defending stereotypical straight guy masculinity, at least for the most part. In fact, some of the male comments here are pointing to exactly how any man who doesn’t fit that stereotypical masculinity also suffers because of that centralized and privileged masculine norm.

     I was mainly referring to Sagredo whom I was having a discussion with at the time, though I’ve seen it several other times. And I do see many defences of stereotypical masculinity, and posts about not shaming men.

     And you know, when I hear those MRA type comments about masculinity being threatened, they aren’t representing me. I’m part of the “threat.” Hell, I’ve been told in activist circles that I’m “not much of a man” because I am against war, and advocate for non-violent action and compassion as a basis for any social intervention. Traditional masculinity fucks guys like me over and over again, and certainly not just in the realm of dating and relationships.

     The difficulty with participating in these discussions as a woman is that you simultaneously have to be ready to respect and accept stereotypical masculinity, such as not assuming that a guy would have developed some fondness for girls they’re about to have sex with, or be interested in intimacy with them, but on the other hand, any reference to stereotypical masculinity is immediately met with “I’m not like that, stop acting like I am”.

     If, say, looking at your partner more as a masturbatory device than as someone you care for (“Why should I want intimacy when i can’t have sex?”) is a fundamental part of masculine sexuality for many men, no amount of acceptance is going to change that it creates certain problems with expectations and communication which we ought to address. But there’s really no way of doing this without running into the same two reactions, 1 “You’re not accepting male sexuality enough”, and 2 “Not all men are like that”. So how exactly are you supposed to discuss it?

     Perhaps it’s best to not comment in these case anyway, but I can’t help but thinking that this is part of the problem. (I.e. The men who represent different views from the privileged norm are basically silenced, told that they are an “exception to the rule,” or that they are playing “what about the menz”) For the record, I have never felt silenced on Clarisse’s blog – I’m talking about other spaces when I speak of being silenced.

     I think part of the issue is that as a woman, traditional masculinity is something you have to deal with, even if it’s not the way of all men. If traditional men don’t like intimacy and company that’s not leading up to sex, then that’s what we have to count on, because we wont necessarily know which kind of man we’re bringing home and they don’t announce themselves. Sometimes that means eschewing a guy’s company, and sometimes whole scenes (like bars), because we don’t feel ready to guarantee sex, and aren’t enthusiastic about a whole night of him acting indifferent and checking his mail.

     Being expected to both accept the possibility of traditional masculinity and at the same time behave towards men as if it wasn’t an issue is next to impossible. Either we have to accept as our premise that expecting a certain amount of emotions (or at leats consideration) between sexual partners is unfair to traditional men, or we’ll have to be able to have a frank discussion about how certain aspects of traditional masculinity are turning many women off, without being accused of not accepting men.
141. 

     AB April 28, 2011 at 3:47 pm #

     Sagredo

     This is something I see specifically behind criticisms of male behaviour coming from a social constructionist background, and perhaps often from those who consider the sexes to be “surprisingly similar”.

     I rarely use the word, but it takes a serious amount of privilege to make unsupported, absolutist statements about the lack of acceptance to masculinity, and be unsurprised when all the other posters in the thread are not falling over themselves to criticise it.
142. 

     AB April 28, 2011 at 4:19 pm #

     @Sam:

     Clarisse -

     re: glorification of male sexuality -

     Hugo Schwyzer, on Tuesday:

     “We live in a world that is deeply suspicious of male desire. Rightly so, I think.”

     Yes, and we’re also deeply suspicious of politicians and the mass media, but that doesn’t change that they’re usually the ones to set the agenda for the rest of us. I fail to see how women’s fear of sexual assault (encouraged by both men and other women) is the same as male sexuality being marginalised. I recall an article Hugo linked to earlier (trigger warning) about the coverage of a story about sexual assault, blaming the 11 year old victim and treating the behaviour of the boys and men involved as something to be expected. Just to give the other side.

     But I’m starting to wonder if part of the discrepancy isn’t who we look at. I don’t see most of the things that tell me how normalised (stereo)typical straight male sexuality is in the way we talk about men and male sexuality, I see it in the way treat women and female sexuality. If you only look at straight, traditionally masculine men, I’m sure you’ll see a lot about fear (and also a lot about how hysterical women are for having that fear), but if you start looking in areas that aren’t supposed to be about those men, it’s very informative what you see, and even more what you don’t see.
143. 

     Sam April 28, 2011 at 4:32 pm #

     AB,

     I’m referring back to when Sam said men would rather have bad sex than no sex, but women wouldn’t. His interpretation was that sex was a bigger urge for men, my interpretation was that bad sex for women was so unbelievably bad that it is beyond what most men can imagine.

     well, problem here is that it’s really impossible to rank experiences in terms of how bad they are because we really lack the ability to judge each others experience. A nominal scale is all we have in this respect, everyting ordinal or even cardinal in this debate is deduced from some axiomatic set of beliefs. All we can do is listen to the experience and really try to refrain from who has it worse contests. Because it’s really impossible to tell what is worse ordinally or even cardinally because we’re all closed systems, and there is no way to compare subjective experiences on a non-nominal scale.

     To continue with the picture you’ve painted – what’s worse? Lack of suitable partners but being allegedly fine with one’s own body? Or being uncomfortable in one’s own body but having sufficient access to sexual partners?

     It’s really an unanswerable question. Chances are, the grass is greener on the other side. But *that* is precisely why listening to subjective accounts is important, and why the nominal accounts of women cannot be logically be considered more valuable than those of men.

     We cannot rank our suffering. Which is what social justice movements tend to implicitly do when they rank their priorities. But just as clustering things will have a tendency to create a set of clusters in which one will be numerically dominant and that numerical dominance will likely lead to implicit compliance pressures, implicitly ranking the experience of people will lead to some experiences being glossed over, and even create the belief that some experiences are rightly glossed over, in order to fight larger-order battles.

     And maybe that’s even necessary in a political sense. But when it comes to people talkig with each other, all we can do, all we should do, is listen and try to find ways to improve the situation for each individual within the common structure.
144. 

     Sam April 28, 2011 at 4:53 pm #

     AB,

     I fail to see how women’s fear of sexual assault (encouraged by both men and other women) is the same as male sexuality being marginalised.

     It doesn’t have to be. And it shouldn’t be. But if you fail to see the connection between masculintiy and male sexuality and violence, particularly sexual violence, you have probably never felt your toch is at least potentially “toxic”, or dangerous. You probably have never been told “don’t push a girl”, you never worried that you may be some sort of rapist when you’re misunderstanding signals and move in for a kiss and she doesn’t like it. The fear of potential male sexual sociopathy – “men are like that” – and ways to manage male sexuality (usually by managing access to female sexuality) is probably among the oldest governance challenges of humanity.

     Feminism has identified a neat way to have their cake and eat it, too, by adhering, for all practical intents, to the principle that “men are like that”, but also claiming that, in a culturally liberated post-patriarchical world, men wouldn’t be like “that” (without any proof, of course). Because if men *actually* “were like that”, it would make the feminist demand that the still assumed male sexual sociopathy (if culturally caused) is a problem to be dealt with by men and men only much harder to justify.

     The contradictory nature of the argument becomes occasionally particularly visible – as in Hugo Schwyzer’s arguments about the “myth of male weakness” when compared to his belief that male sexuality is rightly feared. Or in the discussion between Thomas Millar and me (in which we actually agreed in the end) that took place on a recent feministe-thread (“Monday readings”, a month or two ago or so).

     But I’m starting to wonder if part of the discrepancy isn’t who we look at. I don’t see most of the things that tell me how normalised (stereo)typical straight male sexuality is in the way we talk about men and male sexuality, I see it in the way treat women and female sexuality. If you only look at straight, traditionally masculine men, I’m sure you’ll see a lot about fear (and also a lot about how hysterical women are for having that fear), but if you start looking in areas that aren’t supposed to be about those men, it’s very informative what you see, and even more what you don’t see.

     I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to say here.
145. 

     Sagredo April 28, 2011 at 4:55 pm #

     If, say, looking at your partner more as a masturbatory device than as someone you care for (“Why should I want intimacy when i can’t have sex?”) is a fundamental part of masculine sexuality for many men, no amount of acceptance is going to change that it creates certain problems with expectations and communication which we ought to address. But there’s really no way of doing this without running into the same two reactions, 1 “You’re not accepting male sexuality enough”, and 2 “Not all men are like that”. So how exactly are you supposed to discuss it?

     AB, I can help you with that. Start, firstly, by fairly representing what others (men and women) are saying. For instance, “Why should I want intimacy when I can’t have sex?” is not the same as “Why should I want intimacy when I’ve already got sex?” Sex without intimacy is exactly the relationship one has with a masturbatory device, and it is a bit creepy. But I don’t think anyone here is recommending it.

     “No sex without intimacy” and “no intimacy without sex” are both reasonable boundaries. The first is something we’d expect from everyone (unless they’re doing some kind of consensual scene). The second is something that some people need at some particular times. I think it is more a characteristic of male sexuality than female overall, and I daresay it’s precisely because of that difference that you are complaining about it. Taking a position that the sexes are surprisingly similar and then complaining about the male differences isn’t all that helpful.
146. 

     Lathe of Heaven April 28, 2011 at 5:01 pm #

     AB: “someone has to make up a BS theory about male sexuality not being appreciated enough.”

     Perhaps those “BS theories” you deride are inspired by so many people using vicious, hateful language like this:

     Most men I’ve heard … have had concerns in the range of “… I need willing holes to stick my dick in”

     So much for the glorification of male sexuality; sheesh.
147. 

     Infra April 28, 2011 at 6:51 pm #

     @Hugh (#134):

     It’s not the game that makes the situation interesting or boring, it’s the emotional communication. A simple, “boring” game could be an excellent way to give something to do, while they both assess what they want. You don’t want anything too mentally taxing or skill-loaded, because both people have stuff to process.

     I get what you’re saying here, and in the other parts of your comment. But having said that: as I mentioned upthread, I’ve encountered women who’ve used LMR tactics, including one that was along the lines of a freeze-out (she checked her Myspace account instead of her e-mail, but it was otherwise pretty much to the letter of the LS description). When I place myself back in the context of those experiences, I have an incredibly difficult time seeing the use of games like Go Fish playing out in a positive way, especially as coming off as flirtatious.

     In a different situation, sure, I can see them being used like that. Successfully, even, though I think that it’s something that has a narrower window of application than might be assumed; it’s kind of like how the comedy of a Steven Wright joke is strongly dependent on delivery. Based upon my experiences, I’m not convinced that the context of an LMR response would much allow for it.

     Taking the time out to do something absurd might work — like, say, introducing them to Tobuscus’ “literal trailers” — because that kind of reflects the confusion of the situation, and can be a way of acknowledging what’s happened without directly stating it. That might be the kind of thing that playing Go Fish is aiming at, really. It’s just that, given the specific dynamics of an LMR situation, I don’t think that doing so would be able to effectively communicate that meaning.

     I suppose that that’s the main issue that I have with the way in which LMR tactics are usually framed: they don’t seem to acknowledge that LMR is a situation within which the dynamics have shifted. In other parts of seduction, it’s about moving things forward; in LMR, it’s about working with a backward flow, aiming at recovery, not gain. IME, at least.
148. 

     Sagredo April 28, 2011 at 7:41 pm #

     I’m seeing two different interpretations on the “appreciation of sexuality” issue. The media overwhelmingly displays sexual images of women rather than men. Is that an appreciation of male sexuality, because it is conforming to male desire, or an appreciation of female sexuality, because female sexuality is shown as appealing and desirable while male sexuality is shown as dirty, ugly and troublesome?
149. 

     SnowdropExplodes April 28, 2011 at 8:34 pm #

     @ Sagredo:

     I’m seeing two different interpretations on the “appreciation of sexuality” issue. The media overwhelmingly displays sexual images of women rather than men. Is that an appreciation of male sexuality, because it is conforming to male desire, or an appreciation of female sexuality, because female sexuality is shown as appealing and desirable while male sexuality is shown as dirty, ugly and troublesome?

     It is definitely not the second option. Media representations of women sexually does not, in fact, tend to portray women as sexual in themselves – their interest is not “female sexuality” but rather “women conforming to male sexuality”, or at best, “women’s sexuality from the point of view of their value for male sexuality”.

     In other words, media representations of sexuality (although I have argued that the more “hardcore” the porn gets, the less true this is) present female sexuality as in some sense belonging to male sexuality or men, and not belonging to women. It does not present female sexuality as something desirable in its own right, but rather as something that should conform to what male sexuality desires, and when it does not conform, there are plenty of nasty terms used for women who step out of line and whose sexuality is defined by those women themselves.
150. 

     Lathe of Heaven April 28, 2011 at 9:05 pm #

     The media overwhelmingly displays sexual images of women rather than men. Is that an appreciation of male sexuality, because it is conforming to male desire

     Is an ad for a fancy sports car an appreciation of the love of motoring? No; it’s an appreciation of the love of motoring by the tiny few who have the money to afford a fancy sports car.

     Displays of sexual images of desirable women are an appreciation of the sexuality of the tiny few men who can conceivably attract such women. The sexuality of the typical male is, on any given day or year, more likely a waking purgatory of frustration and rejection. Despite being widespread, you can be sure that this kind of life gets no appreciation, sympathy, or even acknowledgment in the general culture.
151. 

     Sagredo April 28, 2011 at 9:15 pm #

     The sexuality of the typical male is, on any given day or year, more likely a waking purgatory of frustration and rejection.

     Is this true?
152. 

     Lathe of Heaven April 28, 2011 at 9:39 pm #

     Is this true?

     If you want to get all technical, you probably have to specify things like “straight”, “unmarried” and some age range like “16-28″, or what have you. But regardless of these kinds of nitpicks, the general idea you have of the relevant demographic toward which the media you described are pitched is whom we’re talking about.

     And, yes, it’s certainly true; how else do you think people manage to sell aftershave lotion? The fact that you can even ask makes me wonder, and highlights again the idea of the “apex fallacy”. When people, and especially feminists [oop! blanketing again], make statements about men having power and privilege, or having the upper hand in relationships, they typically don’t realize that they’re mis-using the general word “men” to refer to what is really only the tiny fraction of men who actually do have power and privilege, and the charm and/or good looks to hold an upper hand. The rest, the main run of men, may just as well not exist.

     That’s why I find these kinds of remarks about generic “male privilege” to be so infuriating, destructive, and in fact borderline genocidal: they totally dismiss the very existence of an entire class of human beings — men without much power or attractiveness — which is actually a very large group, and one that deserves more sympathy. I would have thought that feminists in particular would be sensitive against rhetoric which makes large but politically inconvenient groups of downtrodden people simply disappear; but experience shows that they’re actually the leaders in this particular airbrushing of the world. I’m sorry if Clarisse thinks that’s harsh, but a general perusal of, say, feminist blogs will show that it’s absolutely true.
153. 

     AB April 29, 2011 at 6:47 am #

     @Sam:

     well, problem here is that it’s really impossible to rank experiences in terms of how bad they are because we really lack the ability to judge each others experience.

     But we do have valuable indications. For instance, when someone wishes to avoid something completely, there’s a reasonable chance it was pretty bad, whereas if someone sees it as the lesser of two goods (not optimal, but still desirable), chances are it’s not that terrible for them.

     To continue with the picture you’ve painted – what’s worse? Lack of suitable partners but being allegedly fine with one’s own body? Or being uncomfortable in one’s own body but having sufficient access to sexual partners?

     I wasn’t talking about what was worse, I talked about who felt most repressed. It seems to me like the majority of both men and women primarily have a problem with the way women feel (insofar as they have any problems), so whatever goes on in our culture in regards to sexuality, it seems to hit women the hardest, while male sexuality appears to be working pretty much as it is supposed to (hence why you and other men keep opposing attempts to change it, whereas many women seem to wish they could feel differently than they do).

     It doesn’t have to be. And it shouldn’t be. But if you fail to see the connection between masculintiy and male sexuality and violence, particularly sexual violence, you have probably never felt your toch is at least potentially “toxic”, or dangerous.

     You probably have never been told “don’t push a girl”, you never worried that you may be some sort of rapist when you’re misunderstanding signals and move in for a kiss and she doesn’t like it.

     I have never been told to not push a guy, and I have never needed to be told, because I have been the girl who was pushed enough times to know how it feels, and I know enough about the ways men and women are similar to be careful around them all by myself. Perhaps that’s the source of my lacking respect for men who complain about being told to be careful, because to me, it’s not an alien demand imposed on me by strange vagina-people who couldn’t possibly understand and appreciate my valuable masculine self, it’s just common decency which I would have wished had been imposed on more guys in my past.

     I had an affair with a guy from social circle in which I was the pursuer, and when I first figured out that this hot and interesting guy I’d always noticed had also started to notice me, I reacted by thinking back to what guys had done to me in similar situations (with me being interested in them, but less so than vice versa), and decided to do the exact opposite in all ways. It had nothing to do with “toxic femininity” and everything to do with me knowing he was vulnerable and endeavouring to not take advantage of it.

     I was probably overly careful, especially compared to how most guys would have handled it. Even the guy himself said multiple times that he was sending mixed signals and expected me to hold him up to them, but he w