On PUA

Are you old enough to remember when the back pages of comic books and popular magazines had ads for stuff like "X ray glasses," that promised to give readers the power to see through girls' clothes, and Charles Atlas programs that guaranteed to turn any 90 lb. weakling into a muscle-bound beach bully?  There was always at least one ad for a guide to picking up girls.  I'll admit I was intrigued by glasses that provided x-ray vision, and I remember buying at least one clutch of "sea monkeys," but I knew the pick up guides had to be a load of rubbish and even if I had been a boy, I was pretty much sure I wouldn't have fallen for those scams.

Nowadays, we have infomercials and pick up artists like Roosh.  And while I'll confess I still slow down at the Walgreen counters where "As Seen On TV" products are displayed, I still scoff at the sad sacks who think the secrets of successful seduction can be found in slim missives dispatched from turd world countries.

Although I am contemptuous of PUA, I don't hate the suckers who support this industry: I feel kind of sorry for them.

I don't really hate PUA on principle, or rather I don't hate it more than I hate Cosmopolitan magazine.  PUA is like Cosmo for boys.  Adolescents are desperately looking for answers to the burning teenage question, "How do I make [people of the opposite sex] desire me?", and these sources give lots of advice, repetitive and reductive and simple-minded to be sure, perhaps reassuring by its very repetitive, reductive simple-minded nature.  It's understandable to devour junk when a person is fifteen, but by the time he/she has graduated from college and entered the "real" adult world, it's time to grow up.

Anyway, I'm all for everybody pursuing as much sexual validation as they need or want. What I hate is reducing both men and women to the sums of their worst parts.

My problem isn't with PUA or MRM in theory, it's with misogyny  misanthropy.  My problem with the PUA of Roosh, Rossy, et al. is that it isn't "sweet love making" that is being promoted, but rather opportunities to degrade, exploit, or humiliate a.target.  My problem is with referring to women as "notches" and "flags" or to men as "betas" and "manginas."

My problem is that I just don't recognize the people who inhabit the PUA/MRM world, where every man is a caged, snarling predator in a gnawing state of priapism, and every woman is either a conniving gold-digger or a maniacal, castrating bitch.

For one thing, nurturing a hateful, resentful, "us against them" mind set is counter-productive to the immediate, pressing concern of getting laid.  We won't even think about how it ruins any chance of a long term, emotionally intimate and trusting relationship.  C'mon guys, think about it:  Roosh gets his dick wet maybe once a month by making pick up his full time job but he's in his mid-thirties now, and he doesn't seem to have ever had a real friend, much less a regular girlfriend.  And this is your relationship guru?

People like Roosh or Roissy or (God forbid) Paul Elam are not making the world a better place, that's for sure.  And the irony is they're so self-evidently miserable themselves.

What's in that red pill, anyway?  Why would anyone want to take it?