Pick Up Artistry as a Cargo Cult

The ever-insightful Doglatine writes:

I realise some people might balk at the idea that there's anything both true and virtuous in PUA culture, but honestly I think a lot of it is just like teaching people how to dance - giving them useful conversation starters, knowing how to navigate common but tricky situations, knowing things to avoid saying, etc.

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However - while I'm happily married these days and have been out of the loop for a while, as far as I can tell this more 'wholesome' end of the PUA community doesn't exist to any great extent any more - The Red Pill has eclipsed everything, and the most famous PUAs tend to be people like Rollo. That's a shame, because it seems to me there's a lot of room for useful romantic advice that's neither anodyne/false ("Just be yourself!", "Be a virtuous person and romance will follow!") nor of dubious morality ("Neg her hard!", "Overcome LMR by freezing her out!")

Maybe I'm just wrong about the nonexistence of this community, but if I'm right, it's interesting to think about why it doesn't exist. One possibility would be that it'd still be too far from progressive norms around sex and romance to be mainstream acceptable, and so gets pushed to the shadows, at which point you get an evaporative cooling effect whereby the main group left in the community are witches. Another possibility is that any community that builds up around dating advice will be disproportionately peopled by straight guys who are angry and frustrated and are thus easy marks for a narrative in which women are empty-head children or evil manipulative bitches. But maybe there's a gap in the market, and someone just needs to make it happen.

I have to agree that the gap exists. I was heavily (desperately?) into PUA more than a decade ago in my early 20s. I also read the Game and felt so excited that finally there was a pathway out of my misery. I never got into the Mystery Method and the baffling granularity it provides, but I did read Roissy and similarly minded blogs and forums. Looking back on that time, while I did have nearly immediate success with women using some of the prescribed tactics, I realize now that it was almost entirely collateral aspects that were responsible for the effectiveness.

This is showcased by the painfully trite and useless advice of "just be yourself!". In contrast, if you build up the allure of a secret society of hyper-effective social manipulators, and if one of those members takes you aside and generously hands down a line or question you can use with the gravity of a well-guarded secret, you will walk into the next encounter armed with a confidence you likely have never experienced before. This is the genius behind lines like "Who lies more, men or women?" At its core, it's just a banal observation and conversation starter, but telling a desperately shy person "When you see an attractive woman, approach her within 10 seconds. It's ok, you already know what to say" is infinitely more useful than "Just talk to women!"

This belies the paradox inherent in almost all PUA advice: it only works when you don't know why it works. More specifically, it only works when it is dispensed by obnoxious conmen with a sufficiently built up mystique specifically tailored to unloved young men. That's why the early PUA folks were so goddamn weird to everyone else in society.

I can say that learning about PUA helped me in my approach to many social situations, specifically dating, but it's almost impossible to point out specific reasons as to why. Most of the lessons have largely been internalized by me at this point. Reading old chat logs of me talking to women I had a crush on are depressingly cringey. I somehow had a much more transactional view on sexual relations, in the form of "I do nice thing, I deserve sex". And the desperation bled through the walls anytime I encountered a promising situation that gave off the hint of maybe evaporating. If a girl was leaving, even for completely innocuous reasons, I'd get this sinking feeling in my gut and an overwhelming cloud of "You fucked up again" coupled with a terrifying belief that I just passed over my last opportunity for sexual and romantic affirmation. And the entirety of those toxic beliefs were obvious to anyone with a modicum of social awareness, especially women who are tuned to suss that out.

I'm currently in the cliche situation of being in my mid-30s and in a very happy romantic relationship. Of course, this was preceded by an almost frenzied and obsessive focus on dating and casual sex. If I wasn't binging on video games, I was setting up multiple dates in a row with different online matches and rotating through sexual encounters out of boredom or a narcissistic indulgence that I could potentially do better.

I've been in a similar situation where I tried to "coach" a down on his luck romantic and it was a frustrating exercise for both of us. There are certain tips that are very easy to teach, most notably the importance of physical contact. It's important when you are on a date, that you TOUCH somewhere innocuous (elbow, small of the back, knee, etc) typically when emphasizing a point. Not only does this break down barriers between strangers significantly, but it serves as a prompt for the other party to indicate interest through reciprocation.

Moving beyond that and you start mimicking the galaxy brain meme. It involves understanding the female perspective to an innate level. As much of a thoroughly horrible of a person RooshV is, I was genuinely stunned when I read his DAY BANG guide and saw that the basic theme of approaching a woman in public is to "not scare the kitty". His recommendation was to ask a very innocuous and completely tangential question ("Do you know if there is a pet store nearby?") as an opener specifically to avoid triggering the understandable fear response that a random man approaching a woman on the street can elicit. This is also hugely important when meeting someone from online; the same cautions must be assuaged.

Graduating from that class requires some upper level social enlightenment. It requires a level of inherent detachment and divorce from results sometimes referred to as "outcome independence". It's the innate confidence that allows you to start looking away from a woman talking to you not because you read that you were supposed to do it to signify high-status, but just because you aren't as attached to the affirmation of female attention. It's a generalized peace that turns every encounter with you into an innately interesting encounter rather than a frantic inventory about all the ways you are great in a desperate effort to hook attention. Getting older certainly helps, but in my case I think significant credit should go to a meaningful psychedelic mushroom trip from many years ago.

So that's what we're left with. PUA tactics undeniably "work", but only so long as you believe in their fiction. And their fiction is only propagated by a very peculiar subset of flashy conmen specifically targeting romance-less nerds. You can get a lot of the same insights through books like Sperm Wars or the Red Queen, but the notion that biological sex is determinative on individual's personality, interests, and motivations is yet another third-rail. The only thing that can fill that obvious gap and also be accepted by mainstream sensibilities is garbage advice that just repeats useless platitudes.

The sexual marketplace is the most blatantly ruthless social dynamic that we deal with on an everyday basis. Attractive people (physically and otherwise) get obvious preferential treatment, but others are also expected to stay in their lanes, and this is enforced even by otherwise woke individuals. If you're not naturally or innately attractive, you have to intentionally situate yourself in a very tight Venn Diagram within the culture war to have a decent chance of escaping your tier.