seduction community

Dale Carnegie: Anti-PUA (Pick-Up Artist)

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-10-20 12:22

Replying to Auguste’s “Ten Worst Books to Read During Sex” meme at Pandagon, journalist/blogger Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise said.

I was going to suggest “How To Win Friends and Influence People,” by Dale Carnegie. But then I thought “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language” is good bedroom advice, especially compared to the names of other people, especially those of former lovers.

Read the comment for yourself here.

A quick random Google of Dale Carnegie quotes also turns up “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Also “Pay less attention to what men say. Just watch what they do.”

Not bad for someone born in the 19th (yes *19th!) Century! Sort the inverse of the 21st-Century cable-TV “pick-up artist” view of relationship building.

And if one can forgive his 19th-century gender pronouns one can see also:

“You’ll never achieve real success unless you like what you’re doing.” Which is appropriate considering how stressed we tend to get about dating, “finding the right person,” and even pickup scenes. (Back in the day it seemed to me that a lot of the heavy drinking and drug-shuffling at weekend bars and “mixer” parties was a lot less about lowering “inhibitions” and a lot more about anesthetizing stress.)

“The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” Tip: “Maybe next time I should wear bigger aviator goggles” is trying again in the same way. Expecting the universe to fit our preconceptions is kind of… hard.

“If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive.” Sound advice for MRAs and counterparts alike.

“Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

For that matter, see also:

“The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.” Remember just as it’s alienating to use others for sex it’s also alienating to use sex for something other than, well, sex. (As in for personal validation. See also, again, Easton and Hardy’s The Ethical Slut.)

Anyway, yeah, I remember doing a Carnegie course for work years and years ago for communications and public speaking skills. I remember they spent a lot of time clarifying that the way to “win friends and influence people” mostly involved learning to be genuinely more interested in other people. Where the trick was being genuinely interested and not just being better at making them imagine you were.

With a lot more years and a lot more time spent thinking about sex, relationships, gender roles and sexual stereotypes I think the actual mechanism for success with that method is that if you’re genuinely interested in people, even if you’re just chatting them up in a bar time-zones away from home, is that if you’re actually just interested in someone for his or her own sake then it stops mattering whether you hook-up or not. Which itself, in addition to being its own reward, also improves your chances.

Which, yeah, makes it sort of the opposite of the PUA philosophy (at least as articulated in the 24 seconds I saw on some cable channel the other evening.)

I still wouldn’t read Dale Carnegie during sex… but he wouldn’t be in the ten-worst-books list either.

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Still Not Convinced?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2008-04-12 15:57

In case you aren’t ready to agree that, contrary to classic feminist theory** the dominant paradigm puts women in the “no-sex” class rather than the sex class then Holly of The Pervocracy has the goods.

Bruno just sent me a wonderful booklet on how any guy can learn the secrets to “getting” lots of women, and I figured that was worth a post…

Anyway, damned if I’m going to read 90 pages of this shit, but the general gist is that women need to be tricked into “giving up” affection and sex and being a manipulative little weaselboy is the height of studliness. Implicit in this, of course, is what Figleaf would call “the no-sex class”—the ridiculous belief that women don’t want sex for the same regular horny reasons as men, and therefore will only have sex if tricked or somehow paid. I’ve heard variations of this belief in a million places and it always drives me insane, because, well, I’m really horny. And of course I’m not horny for all people or at all times, but when I’m not, payment won’t help. Pay me enough and I’ll fake it, but I cannot be paid or tricked into feeling horny.

But why make fun of the underlying assumption when there’s so much to be made fun of in the book?

Read the rest of her takedown here.

Seriously! You look at the stuff Holly’s pointing to and you just gotta ask with anti-feminist friends like that why would anyone believe feminism is the enemy!

Extra credit from Holly

Holly’s Two-Step Pick-Up Magic:
1. Say hi to a woman. Talk to her like you’d talk to a human being.
(1a. This will not always work, and not always lead to `. This is not because you lack some asset or skill, it’s because she didn’t wanna. Don’t take it personally and try again.)
2. Once you’ve gotten to know her a little better, continue to treat her like a human being. The panties will melt down her leg, I tell ya.

The comment thread is pretty marvelous too.

The whole “PUA” thing just gives me the giant creeps because other human beings aren’t a goddamn game, goddamnit. You don’t want to make a girl feel like you’re her friend, you want to be her friend.

And, from Dw3t-Hthr, who blogs at Letters from Gehenna

I posted, a while back at Taking Steps, about how some of the Nice Guy Tee-Em types seem to think women are some kind of arcade game. Put in the cheat code, get laid. Only the cheat code doesn’t work on this woman like it did on the last one, it must be broken.

[** Critical note: The “no-sex” class theory merely restates classic feminist theory to better fit men’s experience of it. It does not otherwise refute or invalidate feminist theory. —fl]

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"Pick-up Artistry" Do's and Don'ts. Especially Don'ts

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2007-12-30 09:33


Image titled “Skepdate” from Cectic.com. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog inadvertently points out that controlled studies are more useful social indicators than random journalism assignments:

A woman carries out a speed dating experiment. She goes to one such event as a human rights lawyer, interested in economics, politics and Proust. She strikes out: the men are terrified. She goes to a second night as a ditzy, brain dead florist who says things like “why is water wet?” The men love her.

The conclusion? According to Tanya Gold, the dating guinea pig in question, men are much more interested in stupid women:

Everything my mother has ever told me about men is true. They didn’t care that the florist couldn’t recognise a chair. They liked it. The feminist revolution didn’t pierce their hearts; it only made it into human resources. If you want to be loved, just scoop out your brain and act like a child. After 40 years of feminism we shouldn’t really burn our bras. We should burn our men. Love may be dissembled but statistics never lie. Reader, let me tell you: men want me – and you – to be lobotomised.

Read the piece in context here.

Well, that sounds pretty horrible, right? Well, it is horrible. But also horribly sloppy. First, check out the methodology of the author, Tanya Gold of The Guardian

I decided to attend a speed-dating night as a fabulously successful, dazzlingly literate human rights lawyer, and then another as a gibbering idiot who works as a florist. Who would the men fall for?

As a lawyer, I walked into a Soho bar. My first date appeared. I smiled at him, and said: “I am a human rights lawyer (grin).” “I work 60 hours a week (grin).” And watched him shrivel up. “I’m an engineer,” he said (no grin). And then he was silent, so I told him I was reading Heidegger. He stared at me as if I had told him that I boil men’s heads.

...

Then came Robert. “I’m a florist,” I smiled. The reaction was instantaneous, passionate and almost molecular: “Can I buy you a drink?”

Then came Harry. “Let’s not talk about me,” I said. Bang – he asked me out. Just like that. On the spot.

...

I could have been engaged by 11.17pm. But instead I went home and sifted through the evidence. Only one in 20 of the men I met on the Soho love coalface wanted to date a woman who had heard of Proust (19 of out 20 cats don’t prefer it). Yet eight out of the florist’s 12 men wanted to be gibbered at again and again and again.

Read the original article here.

Ok, call me an unlettered lout, but pretty much all I know about Proust is that every time I bite into a madeline I think about what kind of nightmare it would be to have to read all seven volumes (I had to look that up too) of Remembrance of Things Past… since that sort of thing seemed to have driven the Steve Carell character to attempt suicide in “Little Miss Sunshine.” :-)

This is not, incidentally, an intended dig either at Proust or Scholars thereof. The point being that I’m not sure one out of twenty people, men or women, at a “So-Ho love coalface” would have heard any more about Proust than I have.

Which sort of brings up my next concern: if she’d recruited a male colleague to repeat the experiment as closely as possible how might he have fared with women? Let’s look at that first paragraph, m’kay?

If I’m speed dating in London’s Soho District (”...an entertainment district which for much of the later part of the 20th century had a reputation for its sex shops as well as its night life and film industry. It has a long history of providing a range of eating places.) and I was to plop down and say I was a workaholic pro-bono lawyer who unwinds by reading Heidegger… I’m not sure how many people (women if it was hetero speed dating, men if it was bi or gay speed dating) would take me up on it either.

But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. Ok, maybe, a little. As I read about Tanya Gold’s little unmonitored human-subject experiment I did start out wanting to mention that I thought men would fare about the same as she did. But!

As I continued reading it occurred to me that Gold had been (whether intentionally or not) mimicking the Before and After characteristics of “pick-up artists” (PUAs) in the “seduction community” (SC) who run around supporting each other’s efforts to “pick up” women.

And trust me, if your standard approach to dating is to brag about how much overtime you pull and how many Nazi-endorsing German philosophers you read, then, yeah, pretending to be a florist who says “Let’s not talk about me” is going to get you someone else’s phone number way, way, way faster, m’kay?

And to be honest, that brings me to what I really, really wanted to talk about. Something germane to both Gold’s article and the whole PUA business: only one in 20 people (male or female) are really going to be interested in a tremendously dull tosser who likes to break the ice by talking about work or dead Germans whereas three out of four people respond well when you pretend at making undemanding but playful conversation that’s more about them than it is about you. I get that. That’s pretty much the core of good pickup/seduction/icebreaking conversation, and so if you’re naturally inclined towards the first then learning how to manifest the second is going to work wonders.

But the one part I wish Gold had tried — the key to most good first-approximation experiments — would have been the “control group” experiment of pretending to just be herself! Y’know, an intelligent, outgoing, humorous and adventurous, professional woman. Because I could be mistaken but I’m guessing that in any given situation that way more than one in twenty men, and maybe not that much fewer than one in four, might have given her their phone numbers. And that’s the point I think a lot of would-be pick-up “artists” need to think about. Because when you’re shy, and you’re worried that you’re not going to be able to “score” with someone else unless you can say something interesting, and so when given the opportunity you either sit there silently stewing over “what can I say, what can I say, gawd her eyes are drifting towards her watch, I’ve got to think, got to think” or else spout out the first thing that comes to mind, like

[I got a PhD in economics at Cambridge.] It was incredibly rewarding. Are you interested in economics, Eric[a]?

... then, yeah, it’s not going to work out so hot. But here’s the deal. If you’re shy it’s easy to decide that it’s the being-an-economist-which-is-dull part that turns prospective partners off when in fact it’s the trying-to-think-of-something-interesting-to-say-which-is-dull part that’s the problem. Sure, being an economist isn’t terrifically interesting, but instead of throwing around subtle digs (PUA “negs”) or wearing aviator goggles in a bar in order to seem interesting, it’ll work wonders just to say something entirely non-clever like “Let’s not talk about me…” Even if you’re “just” an economist. Or florist!

Anyway, points to Jess McCabe for the (literally) thought-provoking link, and half points to Tanya Gold for a half-baked, massively stereotype-polishing, but still productive opinion piece.

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Working the Refs #2

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2007-12-21 18:53

More on the dominant paradigm’s perception of women as referees or “gatekeepers” rather than direct participants.

In that post I quoted online dating expert ClueChick on the difference between how she was raised to view sex and how experience has changed it.

...one of the great great things that casual sex has done for me is allowed me to stop thinking of myself as a prize that I award to someone for being the nicest guy or the smartest or the hottest or the nearest or whatever -est he happens to be, and, instead, to think about what I want out of sex.

She said it here.

And while I mentioned that, as in ClueChick’s case, a little experience can be all it takes for women to wise up that there’s more of a stake for them in sex than being someone else’s scoreboard, it seems to take considerably more to communicate the same concept to men who are too-deeply immured in the dominant paradigm.

And it’s not a trivial issue. Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog has a killer example:

Check out this snippet from the Today programme, split into two sections put together by different journalists. The first section is quite dismissive of the need for feminism nowadays, and doesn’t acknowledge at all that young women are feminists, but the second section has a much more lucid take on ‘raunch culture’.

The most eye-opening thing about the segment is the wide disparity between how girls and boys interpret it when girls dress in what can be considered a conventionally sexy way. While the girls say that it empowers them, helps them get ahead at in workplaces that are otherwise meritocratic and equal, the teenage boys interviewed for the package say things like:

“The first thing that comes to mind is she’s a ‘ho’,” one says. “The first thing, with girls like that, I see them as like easy targets – you can get their numbers, do whatever.”

In other words, these boys at least are harbouring a much more chauvinistic world view than girls. Which is a dangerous dynamic in a culture where rape is endemic and unpunished, and juries are still likely to take the view that girls and women ‘had it coming’ if they happened to be going about their business in anything other than a floor-length, loose-fitting smock.

Equally sharp insights from McCabe here.

This seems like one of those places where neither “sex-pos” nor “rad-fem” factions of feminism are either outright wrong nor, unfortunately, do they encompass the complete story. To get past that we have to reach men/us/me.

Because, really, in what terminology set does the label “easy” apply? Hmm… would that be easy as in “easy grader?” As in “easy score?” How about “low standards?” Where does that come from? Why… maybe… from the whole fucking alienated-from-actual-sex “no-sex” class ideal that women aren’t just supposed to judge men’s worthiness, they’re supposed to be hard judges!

Great little system we got goin’ there: we tell women we want sex worse than anything… and then claim they’re easy when they accommodate us. We tell women we want them to be pure, disinterested, even impartially chaste… and then carp like MRAs on talk radio when you are!

The way out, it seems to me, is to point out to men that, pace “rad-fem” feminists they are in fact using women but that, pace “sex-pos” feminists, since they complain that women who actually like sex are too “easy” they not using them for sex but for… something else. Like a measure of their worthiness. And… um… if they’re actually using women for something besides sex then…

...maybe more fun would be had by all if we picked some other way to measure success besides women’s willing-but-not-too-willing, grudging-but-not-too-grudging consent. Because almost any other point-keeping system would be a lot less (literally) de-humanizing for both women and men. (Not to mention sex for anything except sex’s sake is almost always bad sex.)

Anyway, even though it might sound like a quip, the point being that even if feminism didn’t exist it would be in men’s interest to tackle this because it really, really sucks.

Oh, and by the way, for people from, say, the “Seduction Community” who are just dead sure there’s only one kind of woman and she’s interested in only one thing (vicarious status through association with his accomplishment) you could really do worse than to read ClueChick’s Archives from stem to stern.

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The "no-sex" class: Pedophilia and sexual abuse

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2007-07-21 08:38

My region, either better at attracting sexual serial killers or better at acknowledging them, is deeply and justifiably concerned about what may be the first recognized serial murderer of children in our area in modern times.

Details are unfolding, and many details are being withheld, but the suspect in custody has been convicted and registered for sexual offenses in line with circumstances surrounding a recent victim.

Rather than dwell on the details of the crime or crimes (which you can read for yourself here if you wish) I’d like to point to a 1990 psychological assessment of the suspect.

In a 1990 psychological report, [social worker Michael] Compte called [suspect Terapon] Adhahn an “emotionally and verbally abusive man who has an inordinate need to control others.“ He said the man was “sexually obsessed” and felt inadequate around adult women.

Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ok, so this is terribly terribly important. I was up till 12:30 with my children at our neighborhood bookstore last night waiting for our copy of the last J.K. Rowling book so forgive the possible melodramatics, but Michael Compte’s assessment limns perfectly one of the darkest of the dark sides of men’s mainstream belief that women are the “no-sex” class: whereas it might be the dominant paradigm and a creation of men, this daft ideology also places all sexual responsibility on men — all initiative, all the seventeen going on eighteen responsibility to “take care” of their partners and to show or tell them what to do, all the pressure to do “it” right when it’s often no more clear to them than their partners what “it” really means anyway, and all that responsibility amid interior and exterior pressures never to let another soul know how helpless and vulnerable and stupid we might feel and…

...not all men are up to it!

And when they’re not up to it — not up to admitting inexperience or doubt, not willing to ask for a partner’s opinion… bound by the paradigm from even considering their partners might have experience, or confidence, or opinions let alone a willingness, even eagerness to explore sexuality together — then I think you see men retreating to the criminal refuges of pedophilia, of alcohol or Rohypnol, of serial murder, as well as the non-criminal but still desperately unmanly practices of mail-order brides, of seeking virgins (who by definition have no context for comparison), of seeking to keep prospective partners as ignorant and sexually vulnerable and economically dependent as possible. And in the most horrific instances to overwhelm the possibility of judgment or questioning by clobbering, crippling, terrorizing, and ultimately leaving dead along riversides and logging trails.

And all for fucking what? To protect a mutual, millenniums-long lie we tell ourselves and each other that, while never ever having much in the way of foundation to support it, is beyond words as polite even as “counterproductive” in a world with decent (though not perfect) birth control and decent (though by no means complete) economic and social gender parity.

—-

Note #1: Not that the majority of we men who don’t “feel inadequate around adult women” have much of a straighter row to hoe inside the “no-sex” class paradigm. True, we’re not much tempted to prey on children, or the sick, the weak, the socially isolated, the intoxicated or drugged, or those kept deliberately ignorant. But we’re still left imagining that women aren’t naturally interested in sex for its own sake. And thus, if we wish to have sex at all, we believe we must find avenues to coax, pry, purchase, seduce, intimidate, or otherwise leverage. I’m telling you, guys, the more you think about this particular mindset the easier it is to start looking for the exits.

Note #2: I didn’t want to lump the “seduction community” or “pick-up artists” into the more serious mental and criminal dysfunctions although it’s worth mentioning that the “self-confidence” bolstering and other covering-up-self-perceived-inadequacy techniques offered to men like that by, say, seduction coaches point towards that same dark spot: what to do if you don’t know yet believe you must.”

Note #3: Does the “no-sex” class paradigm explain all forms of (heterosexual) criminal sexual assault? There are too many counterexamples for it to explain them all. And even in those counterexample cases I would argue that the pervasiveness of the paradigm makes it more difficult for members of society to respond adequately, proportionately, or (most importantly) effectively

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