Clarisse Thorn, the noted sex-positive writer and blogger, came to speak to my women’s history class today. Clarisse was in Los Angeles on another engagement, and was kind enough to come and talk to my students about sex-positive feminist masculinity. We had a short and very amiable debate, as I challenged some of her positions. (More on that in a future post.) I look forward to getting some good feedback from more of my students, but have already had a few enthusiastic emails and Facebook messages.
UPDATE: Clarisse notes her visit here. Her post lists some links from each of our archives that cover some of the areas where we disagree.
Clarisse’s article on the pathologizing of male desire got a great deal of attention in the blogosphere last month, and there were over 100 comments in the debate about it here on this blog. A follow-up post has a still-active comment thread. Those two posts received more comments than any others I wrote in October. Clarisse is clearly an instigator of good discussion.
I took Clarisse to lunch to thank her, and in our discussion over various vegetarian goodnesses, we returned to this challenging theme of constructive sex-positive feminist masculinity. I talked about how frustrated I’ve been in my exchanges on the topic with many men, who — as my comment threads indicate — find my writing on the topic to be shaming, or unhelpful, or privileged. I’ve been asked before for “pick-up tips for feminist men”, a request I’ve resisted for both ideological and experiential reasons. I haven’t spent much time around the “pick-up artist” (PUA) and “seduction” communities, largely because I find their views to be deeply demeaning to women (as well as men). Clarisse has a more nuanced view, as one of her many interests is focused on “bridging the gap” between the PUA and feminist worlds. I’m leery that that gap can be bridged at all, but I’m open to discussion.
But in talking with Clarisse, I realized how often I’ve been unnecessarily contemptuous of those men who have sought out techniques and strategies for approaching women. I’m married, of course, and devotedly so. I’m obviously not looking for sexual or romantic partners. But even when I was single, I never had trouble “meeting” women, finding sexual partners, or getting into relationships. (I had tremendous problems making relationships work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) Writing those words makes me uncomfortable; they seem filled with macho swagger. I’m not boasting of my sexual prowess, or at least, I’m trying not to. But though I have had myriad challenges in my life (particularly around drug and alcohol addiction), one problem I haven’t had since I hit college was finding sexual partners. Learning to be celibate was hard; learning how to be monogamous in thought and word as well as in body was hard. Unlearning flirting was hard. Getting laid — and every few years, getting married — was easy.
I’ve always figured I was good at some things and not others. I am a good endurance athlete, because I have a lot of stamina. I’m terrible at ball sports, because I have lousy hand-eye coordination. I found English and social sciences classes easy in school; I suffered through math and chemistry and passed with low Cs. I haven’t the foggiest idea how my car works, or how to fix a leaky faucet, but I’m a great editor of others’ written work. I have my strengths and weaknesses, and meeting people and finding lovers seems to have been one of the former.
But it’s almost axiomatic that folks who are good at something often have a hard time empathizing with those who aren’t. And I confess that I’ve often assumed the worst about those men who have sought guidance from “pick-up artists” and who are interested in learning seduction techniques. My feminism combined with my own lack of experience to make me reactively suspicious of any man who seems too eager for “tips” on “how to meet and mate.” And of course, it’s true too that I’m more willing to acknowledge a blind spot when it’s pointed out to me by a fellow feminist whose work I know and admire. Clarisse gently suggested that my own privilege may well be blinding me here to a real source of male pain, and that my dismissiveness is not helpful to the causes of gender justice and sexual healing, causes to which I am deeply committed.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to write a seduction manual for male feminists. But it does mean that I’ve got to go deeper than I’ve gone before to work on articulating a vision of male sexuality that is both egalitarian and affirming. For too long, my message towards men has come across as stopping at “Look, don’t be a predator, don’t be an asshole, make sure you honor the central importance of enthusiastic consent.” But when it comes to talking about a practical vision for what healthy male feminist heterosexual behavior looks like, I’ve done a very poor job. And some of that failure has been rooted in an inability (and occasionally, an outright refusal) to take seriously the dilemma so many well-intentioned young men face.
That failure has been less because of a commitment to feminism than because my own experience has blinded me to just how challenging these issues can be for many men. My fear of sounding like a braggart has made me reluctant to acknowledge the privilege that sustains that blindness. I’m grateful to Clarisse for many things, not least her gentle but insistent suggestion that I cop to this, and do something about it.
More on all of this soon.
I would absolutely love to be able to talk with Clarisse about this. I’m a staunch feminist with a particular interest in relationship and sex ethics, and I’ve been both fascinated and repulsed by the PUA communities for a long time now; a friend of mine recently put me in contact with the local PUA community in my hometown, and told me they “welcomed a female perspective”, which resulted in a lot of me banging my head against a wall when posting on their forum, but also a lot of insight and positive discussion. I’ve participated in comment threads on PUA blogs, with equally spotty results – including a blog that shut down shortly after I got into a heated debate over the blogger’s assertion that “promiscuous” women would make poor mothers and partners. (From the commentary on the blog, it was clear that the blogger’s girlfriend, who posted on occasion, strongly disagreed with a lot of his posts, and I suspect the blog was taken down as a response to an ultimatum from her when he explained his beliefs about women with more than one sex partner in the comment thread.)
One thing I’ve found is that the attitudes of PUAs vary significantly depending on demographic – there’s everything from the terrifyingly misogynistic, people who make me wonder why on earth they would ever want to date a woman, to the astoundingly sex-positive and woman-positive, but often still oddly manipulative and presumptuous in ways I think the participants can’t even see (basically, just as bad as ordinary society and no worse, perhaps better in their lack of Madonna-whore complex). There’s an overwhelming focus, across the board, on manhood and the need to be an Alpha Male in the eyes of women. One of the things that made me take a recent hiatus from participating in the local forum was a thread entitled, I kid you not, “Don’t be yourself, be a man.” A lot of these men are clinging to the idea of man as leader, man as ever-decisive and assertive, controller of his own “frame” of existence, and influencer of other people’s “frames” – masculine as dynamic and charismatic. Is that necessarily bad? I don’t know – but I do feel that there’s something damaging in its philosophy that the quieter, less brilliantly charismatic men aren’t really men, that no woman is going to find them attractive. They promote a set of traits that can be quite attractive to a large proportion of women, and surely that’s achieving a goal for them romantically (presuming that they can integrate these “new” personality shifts into themselves), even if it’s not improving society by breaking down established gender roles – they’ve essentially decided that their primary goal is to be attractive to women, and therefore their primary way of doing that is to perform effective masculinity. I think they’re essentially playing the mainstream system as it is, and there do seem to be a lot of women who are enjoying their performed masculinity, even if it’s not equipping them for long and healthy relationships. (And it’s not, of course – a “real man” doesn’t whine or use his girlfriend as an emotional “crutch”, which is a great recipe for stifling emotional intimacy – and some of these guys think that a real man is “not your girlfriend” and you shouldn’t talk to them in depth about your personal problems, because they think part of being masculine and assertive is distancing oneself from feminine things.)
Basically, I think that is how I would sum up much of PUA – performing masculinity in a way that is often quite effective in the short term, and both limiting and damaging in the long term unless it’s tempered with some serious personal ability to reject the aspects of PUA philosophies you don’t believe in. And I think a number of extremely vulnerable guys who could really benefit more from plain assertiveness practice and counselling consider PUA a very effective shortcut, not realising that some of the misogynistic undertones of the worse “gurus” are warping his ability to relate to women.
I would also note that for every man who buys into PUA there is a woman who buys into the attitudes sold by Cosmopolitan magazine et al, and the two sets of beliefs seem to be a perfect fit for one another – I think they were crafted off one another, a performance of masculinity in response to a performance of femininity. Basically, this http://xkcd.com/800/
There is no such thing as feminist PUA. A friend and I delved deeply into learning who these guys are and what they do. The problem is that there’s a world of difference between what these men say they do and what they actually do. They’re so used to blowing smoke that honesty becomes the exception rather than the norm. PUA is primarily ego driven, and despite what they say about male empowerment, it truly is demeaning to both sexes. A feminist PUA is kind of like an honest liar; it’s a contradiction in terms.
I think bigWOWO is right in that there really can’t be a feminist PUA per se, simply because, well, there’s not much overlap there. But I’m not convinced PUAs are inherently antifeminist. Say what you will about individualism, certain attitudes are, on the whole, more successful with the opposite sex. Look, that’s a fact, and if you don’t acknowledge that you need to get out of your theoretical armchair a bit more. Since I think most people can smell a poser, for the majority of men, I think PUAs are fairly worthless. However, when it comes to extremely insecure or emotionally handicapped men, following a script of sorts can get their foot in the door, perhaps stop the constant rejection out-of-hand (you don’t even have to stop with romance, the same script can be used regarding platonic friendships with either gender).
Really, maybe all it does is make these men more confident in themselves, so they can develop their own identity.
PS- Of course, some PUA communities hold pretty reactionary and borderline misogynistic viewpoints. What I’m saying is, that is not an essential component of the concept.
Is Clarisse her real name, or a pseudonym? I’m betting the latter.
I agree that there can’t be such a think as a “feminist pick-up artist.” But working with shy and insecure men to be more confident without being cocky and entitled, that would be an excellent idea.
From what you’ve said,or from what I’m infferring, your success with the opposite sex was due mainly to something innate in you, Hugo, and not something calculated or learned. How do you “teach” that even if you wanted to?
@Geni
So my socially ineptness is innate, but almost irrelevant due to being a trans girl and not needing to approach people (because guys are pushed to approach more, so I can just wait for it and still get a start of relationship).
I don’t think social “ineptness” is innate. I think being clueless about non-verbal clues can be innate, but that’s a different beast. You can learn (with greater difficulty) to recognize non-verbal cues, and be more informal in speech to people – hence sound better to them (not boring them to death) – without being “not you”.
If a guy actually becomes “good at meeting women,” he’s probably improved his overall view and attitude somewhat along the way. My own “success” is based on true humility, empathy, sincerity, honesty, and acceptance of my flaws; all the stuff your average pick up guy doesn’t exhibit.
A friend recently called me arrogant because I said that I didn’t want to have sex with a girl I was dating, because I feared that she would fall for me, and I just wasn’t ready for that, with her. I didn’t mean to brag, I was drawing on past experience, and extrapolating.
My advice for men who need it? Slow down. Don’t ask her out right away. Get to know her as a person, not as an object of beauty or desire. Close your mouth and open your ears, heart, and mind. Don’t hesitate to reveal your true self.
There are so many “levels ” of personality; I’m a big believer in the psychological antennae, unconsciously attracting compatible types. Guys who use artificial lines and lies may attract shallow, deceitful mates. I seem to attract wild, intense, warrior types who initiate contact before I do, and I love it!
Always sad to see nice people being deceived by the wicked, regardless of their gender.
I like the article on worshiping a woman (Arjuna Ardagh). While it’s not as deep as it could be, I like the idea of layers, or levels of closeness, one must pass through, in order to become close with a woman. I also realized that I need to uphold my own code of honor regarding myself, and that I’m a prize, too. I tend to not cast my pearls before swine like I did in my youth, and it feels pretty good.
If y’all are interested, I had a super-long discussion with some Asian American Pick Up Artists that extended over a period of months. I think some of them were nice guys, many mentioned the same stuff you mentioned–wanting to overcome social ineptness, needing a confidence boost, using lines just to get in for people who are socially disadvantaged.
The problem is that the underlying morals is either bad or non-existent. Sure, “who lies more, men or women” works better than just sitting there and staring, but if there is no moral foundation, it eventually becomes nothing more than lying, and it falls apart. It’s kind of like martial arts–without respect, learning, and honor, you can’t become a true martial artist. When I interviewed and learned about the PUAs, i discovered a culture of lying, deceit, and strategic means of pressuring women into sex, sometimes even using sexual harassment and innuendos through their master of “social game.” They lied not just to women, but to each other and to those who were trying to understand them.
Here was my eventual evaluation of the “movement:”
http://www.bigwowo.com/2008/12/the-post-pua-era-of-the-asian-american-blogosphere/
At the bottom of the post, I listed alternative means of teaching men to talk to women. These three methods are effective, and they are also far different from what anyone would call PUA.
Ordo – certain social strategies and approaches work on just about everyone. That’s a fact. That doesn’t mean you’d want to use those social strategies, or that you’ve comfortable doing so, but they work. See The Gift of Fear and How to Win Friends and Influence People for examples.
Thing is, they’re not the only things that work, and in some situations they’re counterproductive. “Negging”, for example, may work dandy to get an insecure young woman to try and prove you wrong, but it’s also going to piss off a lot of women familiar with the social strategy.
Hugo! You’re scooping me!
But thanks so much for the lovely post.
I plan to write a really awesome article on PUAs soon-ish. Might be a few months, but it’s going to be great when it’s finished.
In the meantime, I think it’s worth noting that there is some really interesting gender deconstruction going on in that subculture, including PUAs who explicitly deconstruct and attack the most misogynistic elements of the subculture itself. Here’s some interesting writing along those lines. (NOTE: I don’t always agree with the blog I’m linking to — Feminist Critics — but I think they frequently say interesting things.)
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/about/seduction-communitypickup-artists/
Hugo, I’ll be glad to see what you come up with when you discuss positive expression of male sexuality. The inability of feminism to say more than just “what not to do” was one of the main reasons that I started looking outside feminism for sexual ethics.
As you are discovering, other people are the other way around: they would be great in a relationship, but they can’t get into one because they aren’t perceived as sufficiently sexually exciting.
I attempted to repress my desire before I studied seduction, yet I was never at peace with my involuntary celibacy as a young virgin. After experiencing sex and relationships, it would actually be a lot easier for me to be celibate now (if I wanted to). Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.
I will also note that just because you study seduction, it doesn’t mean that you have to have sex with every (or any) person that you have chemistry with. When you feel like you are coming from a place of sexual abundance, then it is a lot easier to refuse sex that one or both people might regret.
Me too. I’m interested in pickup and sexual ethics, but I’m not interested in calling what I’m doing “feminist” because I have no interest in a tug of war over that term. I’ve written some thoughts on feminism and pickup here:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/about/seduction-communitypickup-artists/
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2010/02/24/pickup-and-seduction-techniques-for-feminists-noh/
Darn you, Clarisse, you beat me to the punch linking to my own blog
What an interesting revision of feminism. I guess the ‘feminist sex wars’ and ‘sex-positive feminism’ and all that never happened; it was a lie spread to hide the fact that it was us feminists (yes! I confess it!) nailing up those mysterious posters that said THE ONLY GOOD PENIS IS A SOFT PENIS on every power pole in town. Quite symbolic of us, don’t you think?
I should have let you link it. I worry that I lose feminist cred every time I link to you people, but you’re so freaking interesting
Graphite, I don’t entirely agree with your evaluation of pickup, but I like that you’ve approached it with an open mind.
Yup, PUAs are not a monolith. In my local lair, you will see cliques of guys with positive attitudes towards women, and cliques of guys with negative attitudes towards women. Me and my friends stopped hanging out with certain guys because they would do stupid stuff like lying in the field, or because they had insecurity issues and felt the need to mess with women. These cliques spend about as much time talking crap about each other as they do about pickup.
In small groups, PUAs tend to band together, avoid criticizing each other, and make excuses for each others’ misbehavior (I think this is part of what bigWOWO experienced). In larger groups, you start to see more disagreements within the seduction community emerge. (This is typical social psychology: feminists behave exactly the same way.)
As far as we can tell, masculinity matters. Masculine gender performance seems to hold a similar level of importance for male dating success as conventional beauty does for female dating success.
The notion “don’t be yourself, be a man” sounds eerily evocative of the complaints of women that men don’t see them for their identities, and only see them for stereotypically feminine beauty.
Sure, there’s something damaging in it, but PUAs didn’t just get together one day and say “let’s make a philosophy that’s damaging to us.” PUAs came to these beliefs via their experiences being overlooked for more masculine and charismatic men by women. Like men’s average preferences, women’s average preferences lead to some harmful perceptions in the other gender, whether those perceptions are true or not.
Exactly. If you are a young man who tries breaking down gender roles, and you aren’t naturally socially skilled and successful with women already, and you aren’t in some gender-atypical subculture, then you simply martyr your dating success completely pointless. You drop yourself out of the gendered dating system, without changing a single thing. Meanwhile, you watch the majority of women dating stereotypically masculine guys.
Let’s pardon young men for not wanting to sign up for that fate. A better solution would be to show them some way of being successful in the current gender system while simultaneously trying to change it.
Yes, the forms of masculinity in the seduction community are damaging to relationships. A PUA in a relationship is in constant fear of women losing attraction to them because of them appearing too weak, needy, or otherwise unmasculine. Instead, he must always be stoic and in charge.
Unfortunately, while this fear is often overblown, it’s not divorced from reality. The forms of masculinity that make men good relationship partners, and the forms of masculinity that make men attractive, are not always the same thing for many women.
Yes, most people do engage in gender performance and have gendered preferences. Cosmo is mainstream, and pickup is mainly a reverse-engineering of what sexually successful, mainstream masculine men are already doing.
As feminists point out, we live in a gender system, yet lots of discussions somehow act as if women’s mating preferences somehow transcend gender. While this may be close to true for women in minority cultures that are mainly found in universities and big cities (e.g. feminism, and a few others), it’s not true for the larger culture.
It’s just not always practical for people to hold out for people with gender-transcending preferences. Until such folks show up in their neck of the woods, people need to perform gender in various ways to be successful in dating. Any attempt to change masculinity, particularly male dating behavior, must recognize the gendered expectations that men face.
I don’t know if linking to a pickup blog is going to be a terrible idea and is going to bring them over here for a massive flame war (and if it does, I apologise profusely), but I’d like to give an example of the kind if damaging performance of masculinity I’m talking about, being promoted under the guise of “it’s what all women really want!”
http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/11/orgasm-self-control-and-rough-sex.html?showComment=1288913420140#c5060462567927913540
Hugh, I definitely see where your post is coming from. One of the largest challenges for me in discussing pickup philosophies with pickup artists has been the question of, “But what kinds of women are you trying to attract?”
I think a lot of men who get into pickup are in fact looking for someone who is a completely conventional performer of femininity – the stereotypical high-heeled, fully makeuped woman who finds dance parties and clubs extremely rewarding and entertaining and devotes significant time and thought to her performance of femininity and subscribes to an extent to theories of traditional gender, who would describe herself as a “girly girl” and is genuinely looking for a “manly man”; and, more than that, the kind of woman who really would call a man “gay” or “pussy” for having vulnerabilities, who would only date a man who had the right kind of job and the right kind of clothing, all hyperconventionally masculine and high-powered. And I think PUA is not actually all that ineffective at attracting these women, because it follows the masculinity-femininity script. (After all, someone is buying every copy of Twilight that goes flying off the shelves, and there are women actually nodding along to every fucked-up romantic comedy stalker cliche. Just because a feminist woman finds it unappealing or meh, doesn’t mean all women will.)
I also have gotten the impression, though, that a lot of PUAs think all women, or all “hot” women, fit the description I just gave, and so they may as well resign themselves to the idea that they need to be that man, because all women “worth having” are that woman. So then you have these men seeking out relationships with women who, in some cases, they don’t even like all that much, ignoring certain fundamental incompatibilities because they think the same incompatibilities would exist with all women, and essentially performing for an entire relationship. Some of these guys are from a geeky background, and would perhaps have been happier with a similarly geeky woman who has not entirely swallowed the conventions of femininity as a life plan, and who does not demand the same kind of masculine performance because it really doesn’t even push her buttons very much. I think PUA erases these women, and I don’t know whether it’s because they’re not necessarily as conventionally attractive because they don’t always buy into the feminine beauty standard, or because their desires don’t follow an easy cultural script as closely, since they’ve rejected a script that others have adopted wholesale.
Thanks for addressing this again, Hugo. I’m frustrated because I feel that many of the men who are commenting are asking feminism to do something it doesn’t do well — endorse or encourage traditional gender roles. There has to be space for feminism to address sexual and domestic violence without having to stop and constantly say “but don’t be scared, you can still get a date, and many women like traditional gender scripts, so use those and god be with you.”
In our wider culture, the problems with traditional gender roles are never or rarely addressed; feminism is one of the few spaces where women can talk about the problems with traditional gender roles. I get that for some men and women, they’d prefer to stick with traditional gender roles. But there are plenty of resources out there to teach people how to perform masculinity and femininity correctly. The demand that was being put on feminism in the other thread — basically, feminists are to blame for male social unease and must address sexual and domestic violence differently because of it — made me deeply uncomfortable.
It’s just not always practical for people to hold out for people with gender-transcending preferences. Until such folks show up in their neck of the woods, people need to perform gender in various ways to be successful in dating.
And this is where a lot of the feminists differ from the attitude I’ve seen here. For many feminists, playing traditional gender roles in order to get a date is not worth it. It’s dehumanizing and annoying and frustrating. It’s inherently anti-feminist. So I don’t really think there’s a way for feminists to change feminist discourse enough to ever satisfy the men who would like to hear feminists say “here, let me tell you how to play the part of a Real Man to get the ladies.”
As a socially inept person myself, I understand completely the frustration people feel when unable to form friendships and relationships they might desire. But I wish the emphasis was on how to communicate better with *people* rather than on how to perform traditional gender roles better to get *women*.
I have a hard time comprehending the need for “PUAs.” Lots of guys have dated me and none of them was a “PUA.” To the best of my knowledge, no guy that any of my hundreds of women friends over my life has been a PUA, and yet they all dated women. Clearly, you don’t have to do the whole PUA thing to get with a woman. Really, this is hard to refute. I’m sorry, but the motives for engaging in that community must go rather deeper than just a natural desire to date women, which appears to be the rather disingenuous impression that the pro-PUA posters above are attempting to convey about *their* particular, not-like-those-other-misogynist-creeps-oh-no! PUA communities.
Re: Hugh Ristik (most recent comment)
A lot of what you’ve posted seems to me, to come down to something fundamental that even a lot of gender scholars tend to forget:
Gender may be a performance, and that performance may change/have changed dramatically over time, but it’s probably something that we will always persist in doing, at some level.
What’s important is not that we move to some sort of post-gender world (eek, perish the thought?) But one wherein we all have the freedom to express our multifaceted selves in ways that don’t cripple us.
Maybe this debate might be better had by avoiding the term “pick-up artist”, or at least avoiding presenting the advice in those terms?
The basic idea of giving and sharing advice on how to gain social/romantic/sexual confidence, and in particular, how best to present yourself in order to be attractive and sexually “successful” — that’s a fine topic, and I’d love to hear some advice on this from a feminist perspective.
On the other hand, the term “pick-up artist” suggests more than this. Even the phrase itself kind of objectifying: the metaphor it sets up, the man as artist, the woman as… materials of art? Or at best, as audience for his art? (While not perfect, game-playing metaphors for flirting etc. have always seemed much more apt to me than artist-type metaphors.) But well beyond the phrasing, the connotations it’s picked up from (not all, but large parts of) the PUA community are of manipulativeness and machismo at best, and objectification at worst.
So I’d kind of feel that a feminist man looking for techniques to make himself more attractive would be best advised not to think of them as pick-up artistry — even the advice does end up overlapping (as I’m sure it would) with what the better PUA writers recommend.
Oh, Hugh: you seem to suggest that your experience is the overwhelming mainstream; echoing Lisa, I’d question that. I’m sure there are social circles where what you say is true, where to reject the machismo and (for a guy) is to “marytyr your dating”, “drop yourself out of the gendered dating system”. But in the circles I’ve moved in that certainly wasn’t the case; and they’re not by any means “gender-atypical subcultures”. They’ve been mostly on the nerdier side of anglophone academia: highly educated, socially and politically moderately liberal, but sexually if anything slightly conservative (very few openly gay/etc. people, very little apparent promiscuity). And plenty of us read Cosmo sometimes, but no-one bought into it to the extent that they ran their sex life by its principles! Most people I knew bought in more or less to some traditional gender rôles; many were insecure; but not many turned to specific “pick-up artistry”, and those who did didn’t have notably better dating lives than the rest of us — basically, among that minority, http://xkcd.com/800/ happened.
I don’t say this to generalise from my experience, but rather to question your generalisation. Without convincing arguments or statistics (and, bearing Hugo’s next post in mind, good statistics that really do say what they claim to) I’m very very wary of claims that something is so mainstream that anyone experiencing otherwise is in some marginal subculture.
Discussing this topic in what purports to be a feminist context strikes me as quite insane. What’s next, how to conduct the slave trade in an ethical manner?
At first the idea seemed pretty absurd, but the more I think about, the more I don’t see why their couldn’t be a feminist pick up artist. After all, most sitcoms, say, are pretty misogynist, but there’s no reason you can’t make a feminist sitcom. Many fairy tales are pretty misogynist, but there’s no reason you can’t tell a feminist fairy tale. Et cetera.
I have no idea how you could do it – (but then, my saying that I couldn’t figure out why it’s ever acceptable to express interest was part of what kicked off the earlier discussions Hugo mentions, so that I don’t know how to do it is less than worthless) – but somebody more on the ball might.
Women and men have used psychological manipulation as a mating tactic since cavemen days. The perception – I don’t know if it’s reality or not – is that women share these techniques and mentor one another more frequently than men do. That created a market opportunity; all PUA is, is a formulation of some of the psychological manipulation techniques, coded to men’s gender performance, and provided in a handy book or class format, rather than requiring you hang out with other “player” men for months to absorb their technique.
If psychological manipulation is feminist, then PUArtistry is feminist. If psychological manipulation is objectionable to feminism, then PUA is also objectionable.
I don’t like psychological manipulation in relationships and try to keep it to a minimum, but note that it’s a minimum, not a zero. Everybody manipulates.
Clarisse, you’re going to write an awesome article on this — this is far your bailiwick than mine!
If one of the tasks of male feminists is to initiate dialogue with men’s groups that are suspicious of feminism (and I think that is one of our important jobs) then I’m glad to do it — provided that those with whom we’re in dialogue don’t use the opportunity to promote an anti-feminist agenda, at least on my blog. I think there’s some room for good-faith discussion here.
That discussion is underway, and I’m very glad.
Hugo,
again, I’m almost as impressed by your willingness to reconsider as I am by Clarisse’s ability to communicate.
I think the seduction community is providing useful, accessible advice to a lot of men, but it’s certainly not without problems. Just as “Player”, the term “PUA” has come to imply a lot of things, many of which are not necessarily positive. So I would say that self ascribing that label may be an additional problem for the men you’re addressing – as they’re looking for *positive* ways to conceptualize and act on their sexuality. I think it’s quite useful to look at the things some people in the seduction community have to say, pretty much in the way Clarisse seems to imply, take the good stuff, leave the bad stuff and simply call it dating advice or come up with something nifty and marketable later on.
“The inability of feminism to say more than just “what not to doâ€
What an interesting revision of feminism. I guess the ‘feminist sex wars’ and ’sex-positive feminism’ and all that never happened;’
What connection is there between sex-positive feminism and giving men any useful advice? Feminsim doesn’t center on men.
I never got any sense from the ‘feminist sex wars’ and ’sex-positive feminism’ of much thought given to anywhere above the waist, well occasionally as far as the neck, on a man.
[...]the pro-PUA posters above are attempting to convey about *their* particular, not-like-those-other-misogynist-creeps-oh-no! PUA communities.
I don’t subscribe to PUA communities because, for one, I think a lot of them develop a fairly reactionary and unpleasant worldview- but what I’m saying is, I don’t think this necessarily must be true. Secondly, I consider myself fairly well-adjusted romantically and thus their “tips” are worthless to me. Because, in my experience with real-life “players”, PUAs really aren’t very successful. They essentially follow a script, and scripts are not very practical- social interactions are far too complex for that. But if one is so awkward or insecure that they cannot even begin to approach someone, this script might take away some of that anxiety- it’s better than nothing. Basically, I would imagine that it’s the difference between having no partners and maybe having one. You know?
Lots of guys have dated me and none of them was a “PUA.†To the best of my knowledge, no guy that any of my hundreds of women friends over my life has been a PUA, and yet they all dated women.
This is why I think PUAs mostly appeal to a very specific demographic. I can’t say for sure, but behind the swagger and arrogance of many men who subscribe to PUAs (especially online), I think you’ll find a lot of wildly insecure men who feel as though their true personalities are worthless. You’ll probably find a good amount of high-functioning autistics as well. It’s a minority of men that can’t find romance, but that minority mostly makes up the community.
the motives for engaging in that community must go rather deeper than just a natural desire to date women
Probably for some of them, maybe for a lot. I’m really not all that well informed. But I do think that for the majority, it really is that simple.
By the way -
If you read Foucault’s history of sexuality, I think it becomes apparent that, from a meta perspective, the existence of a seduction community can in itself be seen as feminist. The ancient Greek philosophers had elaborate pickup concepts, but only for pickup up *free* men. Moreover, true eros *required* that freedom, consent (after the “pickup” process) was a necessary ingredient of the erotic. I would actually go as far as saying that this rational devotion to freemdom as a requirement of eros (coupled with the strange social inability to conceptualize women as equals, which may have been a consequence of age-disparate marriage patterns and differences in education) was a key ingredient of the socialized homo-erotic pattern in ancient Greece. It wasn’t just tolerated, it was the *essence* of the erotic, not because the philosophers preferred men, but because they had rightly understood that freedom (aka consent) is required for true eros, required to give the desire a transcendence of its own.
I think that’s an aspect usually overlooked when trying to understand this aspect of inter-gender interaction.
Can we please stop with the PUA=autistic slur for a moment? As one of the few people in The Community who is openly on the spectrum, I’ve found that having to learn social cues that are intuitive for others has no bearing on whether one’s behavior is more or less predatory, and as one of the relative oldsters (mid-30s) most of the really predatory behavior I’ve seen (like asking women to prove their adventurousness by sleeping with you, in a double-bind) were carried out by neurotypical men in their 40s whose approach and ethos recalled Leisure Suit Larry. PUA, at least where I am, is about a certain mid-20s demographic of the Hollywood club scene, and frankly men who are already script-independent enough to be here are going to be practicing principles of enthusiastic consent even in the clubs.
It’s not meant as a slur, because if I wasn’t clear enough I’m sympathetic to PUAs. But since autistic people have difficulty reading social cues, some may be attracted to a script which mostly removes that anxiety. It’s basic logic.
Your experience is legitimate, and that is a negative aspect of the PUA community, obviously. But it’s not all it is. In my own experience, the most loudly self-proclaimed “player” I knew I suspected of having Asperger’s.
I have to note it because its so unusual for me to think this. Sam, your comment is fantastic, thanks for making it!
Thanks Victoria.
Indeed. But I do hope we’re not retreading the argument that we should retain rigid gender roles because to do otherwise is mean to men with autism/ASDs.
There are all kinds of social scripts that don’t rely on being neurotypical, and the PUA script is hardly the only one. In fact, it may be a very poor one for people with autism/ASDs in the long run, because if you’re setting out to attract ‘traditional’ women, ‘traditional’ female roles include indirect social signaling and hints – exactly what the person DOES NOT need in their life.
I always look forward to more ways of growing and exploring positive male sexualities, so I’m excited to read what you’ll come up with, Hugo. My hope is that, by being aware of and including real compassion for those male-identified folks who are having some suffering, that we are able to discuss a lot more than whether or not self-proclaimed pick-up artists are feminists.
Positive male sexuality should include a lot more than how to deal with the pain of not finding partners–heck, we could use all sorts of alternative models for just having sex with ourselves as men.
Sam,
“I would actually go as far as saying that this rational devotion to freemdom as a requirement of eros (coupled with the strange social inability to conceptualize women as equals, which may have been a consequence of age-disparate marriage patterns and differences in education) ….(aka consent) is required for true eros, required to give the desire a transcendence of its own.”
This is a tangent, but it ends up bearing on everything, so maybe it’s not so tangential. This is the creepiset aspect of Greek and Hellenistic. In view of the identification with and iidsprportionate membership fo women in mystery cults, it seems to me that what is going on in this culture is an identification of men with Reason and of women with animal nature. Your observation that basically the culture saw women as unable to enter into sexual relations consensually means that cultrue saw women as not having free will.
Historical Chrisatianity is pretty undeniably misogynistic. (It’s msiandrist too, in other ways, but that’s a different discussion.) One famous Greek monastery (Mt. Athos? – or maybe several of the monasteries there) even has a very strict rule excluding anything female, even hens, from the grounds, as if that would pollute the holiness and and spiritual purity of the place.
Considering the hot mess that Goddess worship was in the eastern Mediterranean was, with human sarifice of especially men and children, it’s understandable that there would have been a pretty strong reaction. But it’s time to 1) let it go and 2) stop letting it deform Wesrern culture, since it’s not even our mess to begin with.
Jim, a lot of the Canaanite had some pretty bizarre worship rites (which led to prohibitions in Leviticus) and it’s undeniable that the Phoenicians sacrificed children, but unless you’re talking about the sacrifice/execution of male prisoners of war, I’m not aware of any female-supremacist goddess cults in that part of the world.
As for the ‘feminist sex wars’, I confess I genuinely do not understand your comment about the below-the-waist comment. As I recall them, it was a great deal of animosity and debate about women’s sexuality and patriarchal norms and how feminism should approach those norms – and no, it didn’t always have to do with men.
“Jim, a lot of the Canaanite had some pretty bizarre worship rites (which led to prohibitions in Leviticus) ”
Yeah, but that sounds like justification after the fact. I go with the developing theory that the Exocdus story is based on a social revolt against the entire religious and poltical order. Lots of things became abominations to serve the purposes of the new order.
“I’m not aware of any female-supremacist goddess cults in that part of the world.’
Minoan religion had some system of bull sacrifice – bulls, not cattle in general. The Theseus myth looks like a reworking of a story of a levy of sacrifical victims – perhaps with girls added at a later date, perhaps original to the story. And Minoan religion would have influenced Greek attitudes much more than Canaante religion would have.
Although perhaps it’s a distinction without a difference. There is a whole tangle of Yam/Adonis myth in that region and it shows up in Levantine as well as Greek myhts – the sea god/dess and her son/consort who must die to regenerate. You know more about it that I do, I hope. Help me out.
“and no, it didn’t always have to do with men.”
Well, yeah, that’s what I was saying – it basically had nothing to do with men, so how was it going to offer men any advice? I read your comment to say that the existence of the sex wars refuted an assertion that feminism didn’t offer men good advice in this area. If that’s not where you were going with that, oops on me.
Not so much justification as separation; it’s a more detailed description of the prohibition on worshipping other gods.
re the sex wars – well, they weren’t about advice columns to men, but there are certainly male feminists and it’s not as though men were forbidden from reading the Sacred Writings or anything. Certainly a lot of the issues were about men, as in, sex with men, addressing male desire, addressing female desire in a patriarchal culture, and so on.
Reading cues as sine qua non is only relevant to people who aren’t willing to explicitly negotiate verbal consent, which might include traditional sex-role-bound types. I mean, I’ve foregone opportunities with a few women who meant their total passivity to be interpreted as consent, only to find later–they told me–that explicit negotiation of consent would have unacceptably–in their view–androgenized their sex role and ruined the sex. However, to comment on the other hypothesis, besides interestingly turning into an episode of Antioch Rules As Performance Art, sex between two Asperger’s bearers is, um, unremarkable.
YMMV, I’m afraid.
As for those foregone opportunities, we call that dodging a bullet. The handy thing about “I won’t tell you what I want, you have to guess” is that you can always blame the other person later for guessing wrong.
I note that there’s something of an assumed dichotomy here between “feminism” and “traditional gender roles”, with PUA by default assumed to be predicated on “traditional gender roles”. I find this a potentially questionable assumption. “Feminism” may not itself always define the cutting edge of gender roles, or their deconstruction.
Graphite said:
I majorly appreciate you making this point; I often bang my head against the wall trying to make it.
You are right: most contemporary pickup methods are optimized for mainstream stereotypically feminine women, particularly extraverts. PUAs focus on the sorts of masculinity that appeal to these types of women. Why is this, when (as you observe) many PUAs are not gender-typical themselves? I can think of a bunch of potential factors:
1. The first is your hypothesis: PUAs prefer stereotypically feminine women (or have been led to believe that they should prefer them). Stereotypically feminine women prefer stereotypically masculine men, so PUAs have to perform stereotypical masculinity.
2. Some PUAs don’t feel that they are worthy of even having personality preferences in women, at least not yet.
3. PUAs can’t escape stereotypical feminine preferences in women. These preferences are so widespread that the vast majority of women have them to some degree.
4. Even if #2 isn’t quite true and non-stereotypically feminine subsets of women exist in large enough numbers to reliably date, they may not exist in large enough numbers to interact with when learning to date. The way that PUAs become successful with women is mainly about practice: spending a certain amount of time interacting with women in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. If you are a beginner meeting random women, most of those women will be closer to the average (and will have stereotypically feminine preferences). You need to be learning to interact with these women, or you will spend most of your time getting badly burned without learning anything. It’s just not practical for newbies to limit their attention to gender-atypical women, because there just aren’t enough of them to actually learn anything with. That would be like someone trying to learn piano by playing only Chopin; yes, you can do it, but your progress will be slow.
I once made a post on a seduction forum years ago wonder why there wasn’t more attention to different sort of female personalities, and why there was so much focus on the preferences of the average woman, when few of us actually wanted to date the average woman. I got several interesting answers:
The average beginner is most often encountering the average woman, and needs to the tools in interact with her. Even though all of pickup doesn’t apply to all women, most of it applies to most women. Pickup does teach how to read women and adjust for differences between women, but this is a more intermediate skill that newbies can’t really afford to be worrying about.
In the years after that discussion, I agree with this perspective. I still think that PUAs should pay more attention to differences between women, and nowadays I date women who are non-mainstream and geeky while breaking many of pickup’s supposed “rules” of masculinity. Yet I couldn’t have gotten to this point without understanding how more gender-typical women worked, and having experience interacting with them. As my music teacher always said, “know the rules before you break them.”
5. The “alpha male” construction in pickup may not be true in describing what women want, but it may be useful for encouraging guys to adopt more attractive behavior. The usefulness of the “alpha male” concept may mistakenly lead PUAs to believe that their theories correctly describe women’s preferences in general.
Shy, nerdy men trying to learn pickup aren’t going to suddenly morph into frat boys or Arnold Schwarzennegger overnight. Even though they can’t actually embody the masculine ideals of the seduction community (which is partly a good thing), exposure to those ideals encourages them to experiment with masculine performance and come up with forms of alternative masculinity. If these forms of alternative masculinity appeal to women, PUAs will proclaim success.
But why did a PUA experimenting with his masculinity succeed? Was it because he managed to approximate the stereotypical idea well enough? Or was it because he came up with a different form of masculinity from the stereotypical ideal, which turned out to be more attractive to many women that men who embody the stereotypical ideal? Unfortunately, the language and concepts of pickup are still limited, so PUAs will often just proclaim success for the stereotypical notion of masculinity, even if they are actually still complete sweethearts in real life who have simply picked up more of an edge.
mythago said:
I was describing my experience with feminism. Are you suggesting that there are detailed positive visions for male sexuality in feminism? If so, I’d be interested to hear some examples.
Comrade Svilova said:
Do you have the same attitude towards women playing traditional gender roles in order to get a date? Is lipstick dehumanizing and anti-feminist?
As long as women have gendered preferences, paying attention to those preferences will be necessarily. If that bothers you, then your beef is with mainstream straight women.
Lisa Kansas said:
Lisa, whether it’s obvious from your experiences with men or not, there really is a pretty big chunk of men who need help in the area of dating and social skills. Not all of these men “need” the seduction community, but it certainly helps if they want to go on dates more than once a year.
Hugh, the point you make about encountering women in large numbers and practicing on them to “learn to date” is, in my observation, a seemingly key concept within PUA literature, but I think it might be a flawed one.
Some of the men who turn up on PUA forums claim that their problem is that the women they meet in the course of daily life (friends, acquaintances, colleagues) are not interested in them for dating purposes, but rather exclusively for friendship. Others state that they live and work in male-dominated spheres and the few women surrounding them are uninteresting to them (one charming man stated that “all the women studying my course [I think engineering?]are ugly, even though I get on with them, so I don’t want to date them”). But there’s a reasonably large group of men who show up to these spaces who seem to simply have never socialised with a woman outside their family. These are the ones who swallow the Mars/Venus theory of masculinity and femininity so easily – they consider women hard to understand because they haven’t ever really tried it by relating directly to women in a friendly context, and seem to have lived their lives existing in different spheres to women, never really giving a thought to male/female intimacy before they realised that, as heterosexual men, they wanted to date and have sex with women. PUA tells all these groups of men that they need to go out and pick up random women to practice – there’s a definite focus on the idea of meeting a stranger at a bar or a club or a coffee shop.
But statistically, that’s bad sense – the majority of long-term relationships are formed between people who meet through mutual friends or educational paths or extracurricular interests or work environments – that is, people who already have something in common, whether it be socioeconomic background, educational background, interests, friends or life focuses, and also often people who have an opportunity to interact with one another all the time, in daily life. (I wish I remembered my source on the research for this, and will chase it up at a later date, which I realise is a disingenuous thing to say.) Pickup promotes a system that’s focused on essentially choosing who you’d like to date or have sex with by looking around, spotting a woman you find physically attractive, and proceeding to go over and win her. There’s surprisingly little focus on finding a woman who is intellectually and emotionally compatible with you, and in fact I often get the sense from reading PUA literature that for a lot of gurus, that really isn’t a concern they consider worth addressing. I think in a lot of their minds, all desirable women are essentially quite similar, and all men want the same kind of woman/women, so their advice is for picking up that proto-woman. And I think a lot of aspiring PUAs get caught up in that system of thinking, which hypothesises that the best or most efficient way to find a woman to date and then successfully convince her that you want to date is to approach a random woman based on hotness, and then proceed with all your interactions with her in a dating framework (and god forbid you should be merely friendly to a woman – that will get you relegated to a terrifying “friend zone”!)
Essentially, the system says, “The solution to your dating woes is to learn to make the majority of random women off the street want you. Let’s give you advice that is as generic as possible, and send you to pick up in places that are either entirely public or are essentially meat markets.” I actually don’t believe that the majority of women, at least young women growing up now, find the behaviours advocated by PUAs all that appealing. I would not be surprised if the majority of women in the Los Angeles dance club scene, where many of the more modern pickup ideas were tried, tested and then somehow extrapolated out to all women everywhere, did find that performance appealing, but it’s a deeply self-selecting group and I’d hardly call it typical.
I think that instruction is a mistake. This post did call for feminist dating and mating advice, and the advice I always give when asked by men, loudly and exasperatedly at times, is, “MAKE SOME FEMALE FRIENDS!” Some of these men don’t necessarily know that there are any women out there who aren’t true believers in essentialist models of masculinity and femininity, and they go to PUAs and the gurus do nothing to shatter this illusion. Having female friends who share values similar to your own, interests similar to your own, daily concerns and fears to which you are made privy by virtue of friendly conversation, shatters that illusion beautifully. To this, PUAs are wont to say, “But that’s how you get friend zoned!” To that, I tend to say, “No, that’s how you get friends.” The goal of making female friends, for a man who is bad at relating to women in a dating context, is to get better at relating to women in ANY context at all, to understand that
- interacting with women sometimes does require a different tone to the way they have habitually interacted with men up to this time (in the sense that, for example, sexist or hyperviolent jokes a guy has made with his male buddies at an all-male school make him look like an asshole around women, and maybe he should be cutting them out altogether, something he may not know if his peer group is devoid of women and of considerate men)
- it is possible to converse with women without a script and have meaningful conversations with them, even if they are quite attractive (some men who come to PUA say that they get terrified just talking to a woman they find attractive, which does make me wonder whether they ever talk meaningfully with women in any context other than wanting to date them)
- women’s tastes differ (Take a poll, see how many women actually want to fuck Brad Pitt. You may be surprised.) and you can probably find a woman you like and connect with who wants to date you even if you don’t perform hypertipical masculinity, or PUA masculinity, because many women (even if hypothetically not the majority of women) don’t want it
I think the last point is the most significant point to make; PUA is to a great extent about making you attractive to a large sample of women, and it decides what traits you should quash and what traits you should cultivate, and even what traits you should fabricate (some people just aren’t “cocky funny”, you know?) in order to be attractive to any random woman from a probability perspective. (Maybe that won’t work as well if and when more women become feminists and are encouraged to critically examine their notions of masculinity and femininity and weed out the bits that no longer make sense to them when laid under a microscope.) I think that’s the wrong approach to teach men who want to find meaningful relationships, in the same way I think it would be poor, if effective, advice to tell a girl, “Go, now, and become a stereotypically feminine dream girl. Learn to be a perfect cook and cleaner, be a little submissive but still able to hold your own when flirting, don’t be too slutty but don’t be a prude, maybe dye your hair a nice shade of blonde, wear more skirts…” In our society, yes, there are men, many men, who want that in a girlfriend or wife. But I would rather tell a man or a woman (or anyone who doesn’t ID within the gender binary for that matter), “Make your positive traits (whether they be sensitivity or the ability to flex a muscle) work for you, minimise and work on your worst traits (anger issues, jealousy, the inability to articulate your desires, low self-esteem), cultivate self-confidence and openness to others – essentially become a best self, rather than a best Man – and then seek out the company of women in daily life, as friends and colleagues and confidantes, and, when you find a woman with whom you connect well and whom you find attractive, ask her out. The one who admires the best self is the one you can be happy with, because you aren’t going to have to put on a continuing masculine performance for her. It’s possible, yes, that more women would want you if you made yourself into Alpha Man – but if you’re a sensitive, geeky guy, performing Alpha Man for your whole life in relationships is about as rewarding and conducive to genuine connection as a woman playing the submissive sex kitten when she yearns to wear Doc Martens and shave her head.”
“(like asking women to prove their adventurousness by sleeping with you, in a double-bind)”
Good god, does that really work on any woman over the age of, say, 20? Then again, I suppose that could be the targeted female demographic.
[quote][quote] And this is where a lot of the feminists differ from the attitude I’ve seen here. For many feminists, playing traditional gender roles in order to get a date is not worth it. It’s dehumanizing and annoying and frustrating. It’s inherently anti-feminist.[/quote]
Do you have the same attitude towards women playing traditional gender roles in order to get a date? Is lipstick dehumanizing and anti-feminist?[/quote]
No, no, none of that if you please. It’s a typical PUA mindset that for women, playing a female role to be attractive to men means [b]looking feminine[/b], and for men, playing a male role to be attractive to women means [b]acting masculine[/b].
No. The male equivalent of lipstick and stockings is styled hair, tanning and muscles. The female equivalent of machismo or chivalry is delicacy and submissiveness (don’t drink the beer, don’t fuck on the first date). Let’s not conflate here.
Urgh, ok, I guess quote tags are different here. Sorry!
I had an experience with a group of pick-up artists a few years ago that I think is worth sharing. There was a guy who came to an academic lab where I worked. He was one of the best flirts I have ever known. He could even make corny lines like, “What’s your sign?†work. I have to admit that had the circumstances been different, I am pretty sure I would have ended up having sex with him.
Late one night I was alone in the building working late. He and two of his friends came in and went into the classroom next door. They had no idea that I could hear them, and I am not sure that they even remembered that I was there. I heard every word, and I have never forgotten what they said, no matter how hard I have tried. They were pick-up artists and were exchanging notes. I heard their analysis of my colleagues, of students, of me and even of my teenage daughter who had visited me on campus the week before. We were all nothing more than perspective seduction targets. They analyzed us in minute and humiliating detail, strategizing about where our week-spot might be. I cannot tell you how I felt when they speculated about what might work on my daughter.
They went on to talk about their conquests. I learned more about a colleague’s sexual preferences than I ever wanted to know. What I heard about a couple of students made me want to cry. It wasn’t bragging. They were planning how to pick up each other’s “leftovers.†Evidently, they didn’t want to sleep with the same woman more than a couple of times or she might get clingy. So they told each other what lines or maneuvers had worked on a specific woman and how to get her to commit the specific sexual act(s) they wanted. This was not standard locker-room banter. It was skilled, well-formulated predation.
Their contempt for the women they seduced shocked me. I am not a prude. To shock me takes more than most people can imagine, let alone say. But those men truly shocked me; actually, they left me feeling a little traumatized and more than a little dirty.
If I had never heard that conversation, I would be with Hugo in his reconsideration. But it is one thing to theorize about pick-up artists. It is another thing entirely to hear them formulate hunting stategies. I cannot believe that I am coming down on the side of sexual conservatives, but I have to on this one.
FormerWildChild,
Interesting story. Having heard and participated in many conversations between PUAs, I fully believe it.
At the same time, I’d like to point out that this behavior isn’t particularly new. Men in other macho subcultures, such as fraternities, do exactly the same “guy talk.” Many women do similar “girl talk” with their female friends. Heck, I hear that some women discuss the penis size of the men they date with female friends.
Strategic, frank discussions with same-sex friends about attractive people of the opposite sex you both know happens all the time, in both genders. Sometimes, these discussions would be shocking to people of the opposite sex who aren’t meant to hear them. But there is nothing evil about this.
And these sorts of conversation aren’t necessarily even the whole story of people’s actual belief, but instead the subset that will make them look good to their same sex friends. I wouldn’t assume that just because a woman discusses the penis size of a guy she is dating, that she merely sees him as a sex object.
Of course, some particular elements in your story do stand out to me as problematic in ways that go beyond typical “guy talk.”
I understand why that would be upsetting.
By itself, I wouldn’t see anything wrong with them exchanging advice on how to have short term relations with various women they both know, and exchanging knowledge of those women’s preferences… IF they were making all those women happy. Unfortunately, if they were really bouncing around between women so quickly, and indeed held contempt for women, then I think it’s very unlikely that they would be able to produce satisfied customers. As a result, I can’t quite get on board with the behavior you describe.
Furthermore, I think they are doing both themselves and women a disservice by going through women so quickly and not being open to something longer-term happening. If they are only going out with women who fail to reach their long-term criteria, then I would encourage them to set their sights higher on women who would be girlfriend prospects.
I’ve heard some PUA conversations that have weirded me out, so I’m with you here. That being said, not all PUAs conversations are like the one you describe. I’ve heard PUA conversations that contain strategizing, bragging, and complaining, but that don’t strike me as “contemptuous” (of course, I don’t know how you’d perceive them).
I understand your concern, but let’s keep things in perspective. The “them” you talk about is two PUAs. I understand why you aren’t in a rush to find a larger sample size, but keep in mind that two is a pretty small number. I’m sure many men could overhear conversations between two feminists that would put them off feminism forever. I’ve heard conversations between PUAs that sound like the one you describe, and I’ve heard others that don’t.
Also, it may not be much comfort (and may not apply to these specific guys), but “guy talk” (and “girl talk”) don’t always display people’s full attitudes; rather, they are a gender performance. You might think that when you are hearing “guy talk” you are hearing guys’ secret true attitudes, uncovered at last! But as a participation in these sorts of discussions, I will suggest that they don’t always display men’s complete attitudes. Communicating one’s true feelings are not what “girl talk” and “guy talk” are for, but rather strategizing, analyzing, and venting.
The pressure is to try to act macho and make yourself look like a hotshot to the other guy(s) involved. I’ve criticized Michael Kimmel’s concept of homosociality before, but “guy talk” is a good example.
Peter said:
I’m open to the possibility that different social circles vary in their gender dynamics, though my experience is that this difference is mainly in degree. You example doesn’t convince me otherwise:
The “nerdier side of anglophone academia” is is an atypical subculture, including in gender. Educated liberal people like to think that they are the default human being, but they are not. If the average IQ of your group is friends is at least 130, then you are 2% of the population (because IQ is normally distributed, and 130 IQ is two standard deviations from the mean).
Furthermore, Barbara Kerr’s research suggests that gifted people are more androgynous from childhood and have trouble integrating into stereotypical gender roles.
Unfortunately, if you are a highly smart person, the other 98% of the population is more gender-typical than you on average.
In my experience in college environments, there are indeed women who prefer nerdy men. The problem is that there seem to be more nerdy men than there are women who prefer nerdy men to other types of men. So nerdy women often pair off quickly into long-term relationships with nerdy boyfriends, but there are still many single men left who are nerdy and lack sufficient stereotypical masculinity to date consistently.
FormerWildChild,
this -
“They analyzed us in minute and humiliating detail,”
just thought I’d mention that women tend to talk about men among each other in minute and often humiliating detail. Guys talking about women is usually done with “nice rack. yeah.” while women DO go one about men’s physique and technique in astonishing detail. The most detailed discussions about sex I had with good female friends. One described the apparently excessively long foreskin of a common male friend she had once hooked up with for about 3 minutes. I’ve never once heard a man go on an on about cellulite, breast assymmetry or lack of kissing skills. To be honest, while enlightening, I think the female way of talking about such things is far more demeaning than the male one.
The guys you overheard were clearly an exception to the rule.
everyone,
Here’s some useful reading material – a thesis by Elana Clift, a feminist/American studies student at the University of Texas at Austin, called
Picking Up and Acting Out: Politics of Masculinity in the Seduction Community
https://webspace.utexas.edu/ejc329/ElanaCliftThesis.pdf
From the introduction -
Sitting at the family dinner table, I watched as my older brother, a senior in high school at the time, pushed his food around on his plate and sulked. My mother, always intuitive and attentive to our problems, asked him what was wrong. He sighed as he admitted that there was a girl at school whom he liked. “What should I do? I don’t know if she likes me!†My father piped up to offer, as he always did, a simple and practical solution, “Well, why don’t you ask her out on a date?†With an exasperated tone my brother said, “Dad! People don’t do that!†At that moment, my mother and I gave the famously useless advice “Just be yourself and she’ll like you!†He responded only with a sigh. My mother began to name all of my brother’s good qualities, as if listing these would give him the sudden selfesteem boost he needed to pursue the current girl of his dreams. As she continued citing all that he had to offer the opposite sex, I could see him holding back tears; he was not listening to a word she said. He was unaffected by our attempts to help him. Neither my mother, father, nor I was surprised by this particular conversation, it was a common one at our house and it always ended the same way. Our parents would attempt to give him guidance, and my brother would listen and nod, all the while knowing that neither of them had the advice he needed to get what he so desperately wanted: a girlfriend.
By the age of twenty-four, the advice “Just be yourself†had proved the extent of its uselessness, he had still never had a girlfriend. He came to the startling realization that just being himself was not enough.
At the advice of a college friend, he began to investigate the Seduction Community, a society of men who focus on bettering their skills at attracting women. On message boards and websites he discovered literally thousands of other men with similar histories to his own. It was within this community that he finally found what our parents had never been able to give him well enough, the guidance and support he needed to finally become comfortable with the opposite sex.”
Read the whole thing, if you have time, it’s really interesting, and seems quite fair.
“The guys you overheard were clearly an exception to the rule.”
Wrong-o. Though it’s very odd to find myself correcting a man, who presumably would know more about how men talk about women amongst themselves when they *think* the woman isn’t there to hear them…which makes me think you’re not being quite straightforward and upfront. I spent two years in the military where men would forget that I was there (or perhaps, simply didn’t care?). My unit regularly assigned some of us to pull 24-hour guard shifts on our tactical site; there was a TV/VCR there, and there was always porn playing on it. (I was eighteen when I got there, so that was my first encounter with porn. Yummy.) The guys who weren’t actually out on the guard shack would sit in there and, while not watching the porn, discuss women. Sometimes women in the unit and sometimes other women. I really, really doubt you’ve ever overheard any woman–because I haven’t–speak of men as demeaningly as those guys spoke of women, both specific women and in general. Really, nothing you’ve quoted so far comes even close to what I heard.
Then, later in life, I worked in a manufacturing plant, and on at least three occasions, happened to be in the reactor room behind some equipment when some of my male coworkers came in so that they didn’t see me. Those times, I got to also hear specifically about myself (which the Army guys didn’t do, as they knew I was around someplace). It’s so funny to me that you “never once heard a man go on an on about cellulite, breast assymmetry or lack of kissing skills” because, for instance, that was where I first ever, in my life, heard the phrase “mudflaps.” And I can tell you exactly which of my female coworkers had them and how very disgustingly hilarious which of my male coworkers found them to be.
Hugh, if you’re really not familiar with the writings of Susie Bright, Pat Califia and Carol Queen, and you’re genuinely unaware that the Butler decision was hugely controversial and divisive within the feminist community, there’s a place to start.
SamSeaborn – what LisaKS said. When you pretend that your anecdata is always the rule and is proof and everybody else is a weird outlier, can you genuinely be surprised when people discount that?
I’ve heard plenty of men sit around and dissect women’s perceived flaws in minute detail, as LisaKS notes – interestingly, this seems to be a group activity done when they think women are not around, or where the opinions of the women listening aren’t important.
“Furthermore, Barbara Kerr’s research suggests that gifted people are more androgynous from childhood and have trouble integrating into stereotypical gender roles.”
Huh. I wonder if that’s why I’ve never had a strong gender identity, not from childhood onward. I once blogged about not quite understanding the *feeling* of being a different gender than the one biologically or socially assigned, since I had never *felt* particularly one way or the other. It’d certainly shock me to the core to wake up one morning as a man, and I’ve spent a lifetime being treated by others as a woman and responding as I’ve been socialized to do as a woman, but I just don’t have a strong *feeling* for being one, or a strong rejection feeling at the idea of being a man.
Oops, this is off-topic. Sorry.
I think I’m running out of my limited interest in “pick-up artists” and “seduction communities.” (Who on earth came up with “seduction community,” anyway?)
Cosign to FormerWildChild and Lisa KS; I’ve been a tradeswoman for over twenty years and I’ve heard more of those conversations than I ever wanted to. I’ve heard women describe sexual encounters in detail, but I’ve never heard any contempt for their partner, the way I have with men. For some men, degradation seems to be the whole point.
And that’s part of the common landscape we—heterosexual women—have to work against. That’s our backdrop. Think about that for a minute. Maybe, more than a minute.
(Also, loving Graphite’s advice at 9:11. All the men I know who’ve been successful daters had a few things in common—and “looks” were not one of them. No, they all: genuinely liked women, were good listeners, and had loads of female friends. It’s notable that their “pickup” technique was remarkably similar to their friendship technique—they just added obvious signs of sexual interest and “asking her out” into the mix.)
Meanwhile, I need to ask a favor, because I must be dumber than a box of rocks. Can someone please define the following phrases for me? It may foster greater understanding for others as well.
“Alpha Male”
“stereotypical masculine behavior”
“stereotypical feminine behavior”
“gender atypical”
(the “gender atypical” is a big one for me….after reading through one of these threads, I always leave with the impression that the vast, overwhelming majority of women in the midwestern US are “gender atypical”….which can’t be a very useful definition of the term.)
Thanking you in advance, Lubu.
“Furthermore, Barbara Kerr’s research suggests that gifted people are more androgynous from childhood and have trouble integrating into stereotypical gender roles.â€
Heh. Former gifted child here. When I was taking the IQ test that allowed me to pass from the sixth to the eighth grade, the (older, white, male) school district psychologist conducting the test passed a puzzle set to me (tangrams, really) and—before telling me not to do anything yet, because he had to time me—made some blithe statement that I didn’t need to worry about this part ‘cuz girls aren’t good at this sort of thing. I interpreted his statement as a challenge; that he was busting my chops to see what I could do. So, with the picture sheet still upside-down in front of him, I put the pieces together rapid-fire to resemble the pictures, in order (“here’s A, now here’s B, and this is C”, etc.). I thought it was the easiest part of the test—which is why I thought he was joking.
I was really surprised to find out that he wasn’t busting my chops; that he was, in the parlance of the 70s, a male chauvinist pig. His shocked expression was followed by in-depth questioning of my gender-identity and sexuality (“did you ever feel you were born in the wrong body? that you were meant to be a boy? do you ‘like’ boys…in that special way that leads to kissing?”). When I told him that no, I wasn’t a lesbian, and no, I never wanted to grow a penis, that I just didn’t want to have to play dumb or give up my interests….it was the first time I used the line, “hey, I’m female, therefore everything I do is feminine. Women aren’t as limited as you think we are.”—he backed off. But he definitely treated me differently for the rest of the test….like a lab rat. No effort at congenial talking, and he stopped looking me in the eye. I told the story to my parents, who were really offended that he said that.
Which brings me to another point: class/ethnic difference in gender performance. Part of my mother’s rage at the asshole psychologist was at his unprofessional sexism. The other part was the lifelong experience of having the middle-class WASP world informing her on a daily basis that she/us weren’t “real” women. Y’know, those of us who’ve never been put on the pedestal. Performing that guy’s version of feminine gender performance would be completely nonfunctional for us.
I have, and often. The only difference is that women are less likely to do it around any men who might hear them and take issue with what they say or report it to anyone else. I heard this a lot as a child (and had it directed at me) when I was with my aunts and their female friends, especially with my feminist aunt. I also heard this often when I did retail work, from co-workers to customers (on several occasions women came to the register making terrible comments about some man or men in general and would ask me if they were right).
What surprised me was not what women said, but how they said it. With men there tends to be an indifference in their speech, meaning that they do not necessarily care about who they are talking about. With women, I noticed that when they demean men (or anyone), they really seem to mean what they say. It is intentionally biting and demeaning, and it is done in very malicious way.
At first I was going to avoid this post and not touch it with a ten foot pole…. but…
I don’t see any harm in trying to reconcile PUAs into feminist ideology…if more men were on board with women are human beings maybe more women would act like they are… I’m just not sure if sneaking in there under the guise of traditional male gender roles is moral…like the ends justify the means…not too sure about that… I would be pretty confused if a guy acted one way to get me, and then slowly maybe even subtly changed into a (better???) different man that what I was used to in my dating circles… I know I’ve been baffled by guys who shower me with attention to “get me” then once they have me, ignore me like I don’t exist…or at best are frustrated I share the same space with them… I’ve also known girls who were baffled by guys who started out aloof (like basic PUA principles) and then started getting in their words…clingy…so I’m not sure if we’d even reach the ends through those means and the whole thing would end up pointless.
Hugh, if we’re going by anecdote here, my experience as a nerdy woman in that college environment was that there were a lot of nerdy men who preferred to focus on a) non-nerdy women and/or b) the few nerdy women who were at the higher end of the bell curve for being conventionally attractive. So you had a large contingent of nerdy women being completely ignored by nerdy guys, plus a large contingent of nerdy guys who complained they couldn’t find any female companionship.
Now, you’re probably about to tell me that there’s no reason a nerdy guy should pursue women he finds unattractive, and that’s so. But I did find it a little silly how many of the complainers had a large group of of platonic female friends, at the same time that they complained how they couldn’t get the one hot girl at their D&D game or the pretty non-nerd in their mandatory English Lit class to go out with them.
Toysoldier, I have to say that hasn’t been my experience at all. The most vituperative comments I’ve heard from men were directed at a particular woman, generally over some perceived offense given to one of them.
I second mythago’s experience indefinitely…Being a nerdy girl… I was accused on a message board a while back of having a fake picture of myself because no girl who knows that much about computers is that hot… I kid you not… then I was accused of being a bitch…for absolutely no reason…it’s not even like any of them asked me out…they knew I was married though…some of the guys were still amicable(the ones that considered themselves attractive)…but some of the others (funny enough, ones that I didn’t think were unattractive)…you could just feel the hatred radiating through the screen…
“meaning that they do not necessarily care about who they are talking about”
Indifference coupled with an insult IS demeaning…or rather dehumanizing…if you’re really that indifferent why say anything at all?
or rather…at least from my perspective….I can’t really say that it IS anything..
“generally over some perceived offense given to one of them.”
“meaning that they do not necessarily care about who they are talking aboutâ€
Could these two statements coupled together reveal a cognitive dissonance?
I suspect that PUA advice consists of a combination of:
1) Things that don’t actually work (don’t get you any better results than other approaches would, maybe even worse than some), but people buy into them because they’re so desperate for something, and having any idea at all what to say helps with their confidence.
2) Things that do work, but in a much more subculture-specific way than is claimed (maybe, as Eurosabra suggests, fitting some particular set in the LA club scene, or some such thing).
3) Things that do work, and are ethical (in the sense that they can lead to mutually happy and enthusiastic relationships).
4) Things that do work, and are unethical (in the sense that, when they work, they do so mainly be preying on certain people’s self-esteem or inability to defend their boundaries, and may get you laid, but not in ways that are actually conducive to the other party’s happiness).
On nerds, I’ve come to suspect, looking back, that I actually was, when I was younger, the nerdy woman who was toward the high end of the bell curve in conventional attractiveness, and that this is why my memory of my college and single days is one of being surrounded by men who were willing to sleep with me (even if not always the ones I wanted and not always on my preferred terms). I think I didn’t realize it at the time, because I was never so attractive that I couldn’t point to some other woman who was prettier, and because most of the pretty non-nerd women did way better than I did at self-presentation.
I also think that La Lubu’s right that “gender atypical” often translates to “perfectly ordinary for men or women of a different subculture, class, or ethnicity from the one I’ve chosen to designate as the gender norm.”
“3) Things that do work, and are ethical (in the sense that they can lead to mutually happy and enthusiastic relationships”
I think this is somewhat problematic to lay out though…the idea that it leads to mutually happy and enthusiastic relationships almost dismisses the idea in the possibility of a breakup of that relationship that it was due to actual differences as opposed to one person not being able to keep up the feminine/machismo act.
not saying it’s inevitable for a breakup to occur…but I’d hardly think one “acting” for the rest of their life is happy or enthusiastic…if I had to act feminine for the rest of my life I’d much rather be single…
I think this is somewhat problematic to lay out though…the idea that it leads to mutually happy and enthusiastic relationships almost dismisses the idea in the possibility of a breakup of that relationship that it was due to actual differences as opposed to one person not being able to keep up the feminine/machismo act.
Not everything that has ever fallen under the rubric of “PUA advice” trades on role-playing, though. I’m thinking of “follow good personal hygiene practices—bathe, brush teeth, comb hair” or “go ahead and say hello! introduce yourself.” Those tactics work, are ethical, and don’t involve any silly canned scripts.
“Not everything that has ever fallen under the rubric of “PUA advice†trades on role-playing, though. I’m thinking of “follow good personal hygiene practices—bathe, brush teeth, comb hair†or “go ahead and say hello! introduce yourself.†Those tactics work, are ethical, and don’t involve any silly canned scripts.”
You mean those aren’t duh?!? moments? People really need that as advice? YIKES!
Heh! Well, that’s in the books, so apparently some folks are in need of advice that basic!
That seems more a product of limited human interaction, than one of limited interaction with the opposite sex…I was under the impression we were talking specifically about PUA discourse in the context of romantic relationships.
HughRitsik: Just for the sake of clarity, it was not two men; it was three. The guy I knew had brought in two of his friends.
For HughRitsik and SamSeaborn, let me be clear, I can undetstand how you would feel about a guys genitals being described in detail. I don’t do that sort of thing, not because I am a prude but becaue I try to be respectful of another person’s body. It really is not okay for either gender, in my opinion.
Here are my two big problems with what is being argued here. First, The image of the guys who need PUA training is that of a geeky or socially inept guy who needs help. These three men were nothing like that. They were returning students, in their late 20′s and early 30′s giving them a competitive advantage on a college campus. These were guys who were probably batting at least a 300 before they were trained. The guy who flirted with me might have upped his game, but there is no way that he didn’t have game to begin with. So I am not so sure that this is a service for guys who need coaching to get a single date a week. This seems more training for guys who want to get into the double digits every week.
Second, the discussion was not how to seduce; it was how to con. The strategies being shared were not of how to satisfy a woman. Frankly, I would have been delighted had they been discussing what touch or word can encourage a woman become her authentic sexual self. I would have been a tad embarrassed but I would have cheered if they had been talking about how to make a space for a woman where she can drop her guard along with her decorum, modesty and perhaps even her decency. I would have been impressed if they were discussing how to release a woman’s inner wildness, how to make her every exhalation a small growl.
They were not. A lot of the conversation was centered around how to get a woman take it up the butt, let you come on her face or deep throat (evidently you have to be careful with this, if you talk a woman into it but she doesn’t know how to handle it right she will throw up on you.) One guy was especially proud of himself because he had gotten a woman to give him anninglus while she jerked him off. She had stopped once, crying, offering to blow him, let him take her up the butt, anything but go back to that. He was proud that he had convinced her to go back and finish the job. He and his friends laughed about her and chalked her up as one of those “dumb sluts” that you can get to do just about anything.
They mocked my colleague and friend for producing too much lubrication, for liking to be slapped during sex and they were horrified and disgusted that she had ejaculated. They called her a skank, a whore, and the guy who slept with her acted as if she made him sick as if she were something that he was desperate to get off the bottom of his shoe. Meanwhile, one of his friends wanted to hit on my colleague because he had never been with a squirter.
Here is what I objected to the most – they convinced women to do things and then they denigrated them for having done it. Either you applaud and respect a woman for doing something outside of her comfort zone, or remain chaste and filled with disgust for people who engage in certain sex acts. It is unfair and immoral to talk and seduce a person into doing something that you will be repulsed by.
@kristina and @LaLubu: Yes, when I said stuff that’s ethical and can lead to mutual enthusiastic relationships, I was thinking of the “follow good personal hygiene practices—bathe, brush teeth, comb hair†or “go ahead and say hello! introduce yourself†kinds of advice, rather than things that leave you stuck in a role you can’t comfortably maintain. (And, obviously, some of those mutually enthusiastic relationships might still break up in time, but it would be the kind of break up where you both realize it was good when it was good.)
I don’t call it “dodging a bullet.” I call it “failure to deal with Russian women in Russia, Israel, Germany, and America as they actually are” or alternately, “my teens and half of my twenties.” But at least now I recognize it as sub-culture-specific, whereas 10 years ago I would have happily told you “All women are Wall Girl, they just don’t let you know until it’s too late.” And yes, I would reiterate that I have always been an extrovert, but I turned to PUA for dating advice and my dating life took off (from zero) when I began doing Pick-Up. It helps quite a bit if you know your own values and can look for them in a partner, of course, but yes, it is built on “Find/Meet/Attract/Close.”
Sam said:
For once, I don’t quite agree with Sam. I think the discussion in FormerWildChild’s story was merely on the more extreme end of “guy talk.” So while I don’t think that discussion is typical, I can’t see it as an “exception” to how men in macho subcultures talk about women.
FormerWildChild said:
Then the discussion makes even more sense. As you add guys to a macho discussion, the level of macho-ness doesn’t increase linearly, it increases exponentially.
Ah, that makes sense. If these guys got into pickup when they were older and already successful, then they probably had already developed most of their negative attitudes towards women prior to finding the seduction community. Upon finding it, they interpreted it to serve their existing attitudes.
If you’d been listening to a conversation by former nerd PUAs, I suspect it would have sounded different.
That pisses me off.
That doesn’t sound like enthusiastic consent, and I can’t get on board with such a lack of empathy.
I agree, and I don’t understand this attitude either.
Pickup serves both men who are unsuccessful with women and want help, and men who are already successful and want to be even more successful. The former category is more numerous. Shy or geeky guys, or Elana Clift’s brother in the honors thesis Sam linked to, are a lot more typical of PUAs.
I really lack the knowledge to understand how it can go from zero to whatever you are at from what at times seems like an out of body experience in dating…I have to say that one of the principles I’ve seen which is to actually LISTEN to what the woman is saying is a good one…but it seems the only reason to know that in PUA is to know how to respond in order to make yourself more attractive…by either pushing or pulling socially..not because you are actually sharing a vested interest and pushing and pulling come naturally out of having similar views or even expressing a dissimilar view without sounding condescending… I guess I’m saying that I see parallels in unscripted interactions that are less…fake?
Read some of the linked article from Sam… wanted to barf… yeah the ends are noble…but I still disagree with the means…to me it basically described how to be typically masculine, and stated in itself that it was more of a reflection on past social interactions (PUA tactics)but developed to suit today’s social complexities…being a feminist, this is undermining any feminist ideology…
It self-described in ways how men use women to bond…is that really new???? It’s only new in the context of how to deal with those pesky feminists…
Hugh, I don’t think any of us are objecting to that part of PUA which is just social skills and confidence training applied to dating. The problem comes in for what seems to be the rather larger part of PUA that’s about ‘scoring’, about treating women as targets to be tricked out of sex, and about gaining status with other men by comparing the number and conventional attractiveness of one’s sex partners. (I recall reading a newspaper article about a ‘nice’ PUA instructor who eagerly showed the reporter he had over a hundred pictures of women he’d picked up on his iPhone – the high-tech equivalent of notches on the bedpost, I suppose.)
to add to mythago’s list: the disrespecting of boundaries and considering women incapable of forthright communication (see “shit test” and the like).
I’d really like to see women behave like this and see what happens…oh no wait…they’re called sluts…except perhaps even those women aren’t really “bonding” over the use of men by keeping track of who what where when and how they got a date? got them in bed? talked to them for more than 5 minutes…I mean I don’t understand the goal…is it to get women to sleep with you…some people claim it’s not about that without actually claiming that, it’s reframed as helping social skills instead…sounds a bit dubious, or deluded.
“to add to mythago’s list: the disrespecting of boundaries and considering women incapable of forthright communication (see “shit test†and the like).”
Shit test should only be applied to women who are poor communicators…not that they deserve boundaries being breached….but it’s not a freaking test for crying out loud…it’s poor communication skills…I see men who can’t have lasting relationships “with the bitch” because she can’t make up her mind, or expects him to read her mind even after the relationship is established….you’d think after multiple relationships like that guys would start to realize the common symptom is they are crappy communicators…the test is to see how bad you are at realizing she is deficient…guess what you failed.
To the people who were suggesting that FormerWildChild’s experience with the overheard conversation was unremarkable because women do it too – does that make that level of degradation of one’s sex partners any better, or more acceptable, from either sex?
Sam: “Ah, that makes sense. If these guys got into pickup when they were older and already successful, then they probably had already developed most of their negative attitudes towards women prior to finding the seduction community. Upon finding it, they interpreted it to serve their existing attitudes.”
Not necessarily. A lot – I would probably say the majority – if PUA spaces are rife with that kind of misogyny, and general assholery, at least for the first few years of their existence. Sometimes attitudes get more positive as founders get older and wiser and less bitter about a lack of dating success; often they only get worse. Given that a lot of these places tell men to first “kill the nice guy within themselves”, I don’t find that at all surprising (and no, they don’t mean “stop being a doormat”, or at least, they don’t only mean that; a lot of these men are the ones who say, “Hot women only like jerks – so I guess I just have to be a jerk!” I know it’s entirely possible their bitterness comes from legitimate pain, but I have very little sympathy for a man who will jump at the advice to be an asshole and think it’s a good idea.)
There is a blog I’m not going to link to here directly, because it is utterly execrable, which gives pickup advice and is wildly successful in a certain part of the internet. You can find it if you want; it’s called “Citizen Renegade”, and is run by someone who writes under the moniker “Roissy”, which should be familiar to those who’ve read The Story of O. Whenever people tell me that PUAs are mostly just well-meaning guys who really love women, I show them his blog (which is full of articles like, “Make her dread leaving you; keep her in a constant state of nervousness by undermining her faith in your relationship, and she’ll try extra hard and give you more blowjobs!”, “Rape fantasies: all women have them, so you should just enact one on your girlfriend without her consent beforehand” and “Which is harder on a woman’s looks – being overweight or old? Let’s find out by viciously ripping into older women and larger women!”). For every relatively genial if unwittingly damaging guru like David DeAngelo, there is a Roissy. It sounds like scaremongering to say this, but it’s important to note that a large portion of the PUA community genuinely can be “written off” as that bad.
“If you’d been listening to a conversation by former nerd PUAs, I suspect it would have sounded different.”
Usually the loudest voices tend to be the less desired voices…I would LOVE to hear this scenario in action, to get a less…hmmm… biased perception?
(When I say that DeAngelo is unwittingly damaging – part of his conversational theory encourages men to leave fast before they fuck up, and to believe that you’ll need every trick in the book to sleep with a woman, which creates a pretty damaging feedback loop where men think they’ll only succeed for as long as they perform perfectly and are not their real selves.)
@Lisa Kansas
To the best of my knowledge, no guy that any of my hundreds of women friends over my life has been a PUA, and yet they all dated women. Clearly, you don’t have to do the whole PUA thing to get with a woman. Really, this is hard to refute.
I’m a tad unclear about your wording since a word seems to have been omitted, but if I understand correctly you meant that your women friends’ dates have never been PUAs. Which is good, but doesn’t address the point I think. The point is some men have trouble getting dates (which is why they get pulled into PUA in the first place because the PUA community sends a seductive message) but pointing to some other men and saying “they get dates!” doesn’t address the issue.
None of which entails a necessity for PUAs (because a lot of the prominent advice seems to entail lying, including to themselves, in practice if not in theory).
@Graphite
the advice I always give when asked by men, loudly and exasperatedly at times, is, “MAKE SOME FEMALE FRIENDS!†… Having female friends who share values similar to your own, interests similar to your own, daily concerns and fears to which you are made privy by virtue of friendly conversation, shatters that illusion beautifully.
I agree with the advice you’ve given, but that only eliminates the problems of one of the subsets of men that you talk about. The other subset should do well with the other half of your advice I think.
I do think that filling women in your life isn’t practical in some cases for some men; they’re either in an area that’s relatively devoid of women or their interests just don’t align properly, and moving or changing their interests to that extent is undesirable.
The other thing is competition. People are vicious towards each other and can/will sabotage your efforts because they’re jealous/petty/want what you want. How do people defend against that sort of thing?
@Hugh
Furthermore, Barbara Kerr’s research suggests that gifted people are more androgynous from childhood and have trouble integrating into stereotypical gender roles.
Oh, that makes so much sense now! Except that I actually did read the link, and I’m not so sure that’s what it’s concluding (the link doesn’t really make any conclusions directly in this regard.) I do feel similarly to Lisa and La Lubu (except that I’m a boy) in terms of gender identity, however, and I was also a former gifted child.
It makes some observations in the US environment (for example, US high schools are a rather unique environment in their promotion of college feeder sports; I don’t think any other country does this, so the kindergarten red shirt strategy doesn’t happen as often) that may have the same characteristics in other countries that don’t have the same type of environmental factors, so I’m not sure that’s useful.
Ok…can we back up a minute? Those questions I asked earlier weren’t rhetorical. I really want to know. What (TF) is an “alpha male”? I know what it means in regards to wolves, but seeing as human beings don’t run in small social groups where only one pair-bond is allowed to procreate, with the rest of the social group dedicated to the raising of that one pair-bond’s offspring…it doesn’t make sense to me.
The “masculine” behavior advocated in a hell of a lot of PUA literature seems more like stereotypical “feminine” behavior to me—think: “Mean Girls”. Being catty is masculine? (and cattiness is supposedly valued in men, when it isn’t in women? really?) I read the PUA scripts—from both sides—as demanding a high degree of immaturity to “work”. And immaturity…..doesn’t work well in my world (a world where most people have had adult responsibilities since childhood).
It leaves me wondering just what kind of world those tactics are working in. As in, mostly….they’re not. Can there be a “pro-feminist pick up artist?” No…but there can be pro-feminist frank communication about sex and/or relationships, and that form of communication is going to necessarily lead to more success in forming (and maintaining) sexual (and other) relationships. I think of the PUA stuff as being as reliable as “you too can lose 30 pounds in one month!” or “you too can make a million dollars flipping homes” or whatever popular con job is going around.
Graphite said:
It’s nice to see someone who critiques pickup who has actually read pickup theories, and references them in that critique.
Yes, leaving fast out of fear can be problematic. Furthermore, from what I recall, DeAngelo argues that you need to be “Cocky & Funny” throughout the whole interaction, and not drop it. I don’t agree. Cocky & Funny can be a great way to grab someone’s interest, but once both people are committed to a conversation, you can drop it and actually be serious (you can’t do this with all women, but you can do it with many). This does not mean that you are chopping off your balls.
I am quite familiar with Roissy. While he has a very popular blog blog that combines basic pickup with misogynistic ranting and men’s rights, he isn’t considered important in the seduction community at large. He is an offshoot.
I used to find him funny, but I had to get on his case when he started talking about slapping women because it turned them on in a condoning fashion (my original post was in a thread that was deleted, but I brought up my criticism again here). I had a couple flamewars with some of his blog denizens resulting in me being called a “gender traitor” among other things. Good times.
La Lubu – in PUA parlance, an Alpha Male is meant to be someone who puts themselves first and does not suppicate to others, and who is not afraid of rejection. An Alpha Male is also meant to be someone who will be admired by other men, and who will get the most female attention, but is not necessarily nice, being more likely to radiate power than trustworthiness, and more likely to receive compliments than give them. In contrast, a Beta Male is meant to be someone who is kinder but also more likely to supplicate to the desires of others, less likely to radiate power and more likely to radiate trustworthiness.
So, according to them, if a woman asks a man in a nightclub to hold her drink for her while she goes to the bathroom, a Beta will say sure, while an Alpha will say, “What am I, your waiter?” or will take the drink and, with a cheeky grin, swallow half of it.
A lot of PUAs believe that Betas are men women want friendship with, but they are more attracted to Alpha traits because [tired evo psych cliches that you can probably extrapolate] and therefore want to date Alpha men. Some of the more astute PUAs acknowledge that in a romantic relationship both Alpha and Beta traits need to come into play, but a lot of them warn heavily against becoming “Betaized” in a relationship, becoming a reliable man who is cuddleable rather than a man who is adventurous, confident and occasionally slightly aloof.
There’s a small kernel of truth in the idea that some “beta” things are a turnoff – a man who does act like a doormat all the time and puts all women on a pedestal can be hard to respect, and it’ll often feel like they’re worshipping a girlfriend rather than connecting with her. And the confidence and that they associate with “alpha” is often attractive, because hey, confidence is generally attractive, and also makes it easier to actually ask people out and properly articulate one’s own desires.
But Alpha as a concept is often taken to an extremely unattractive extreme – covert self-aggrandizement and selfishness, “cockiness”, when confidence and a reasonable amount of balancing self-interest with caring about others is really far more attractive and less likely to make you into an asshole.
La Lubu: from citizen renegade: “My buddy is an alpha male. He teases, he bellows, he rises to anger, he’s sexual, he gives as good as he gets, and he tolerates ZERO bullshit from his girlfriend.”
Hugh (I think I might start calling you Ristik, as the Hugo/Hugh thing is creating some cognitive dissonance):
Yeah, that second comment of yours? Not impressed, especially with the “Roissy’s critics are biased and don’t know how reality really works”. Also not impressed that you found him funny before you thought he was being serious. I can accept that some of the DeAngelo advice would work; that Mystery/Style advice can work. Roissy’s advice is 80% “women just want to be submissive and serve you, which is why they’re pathetic and you should have a lot of sex with them; any woman who doesn’t is disgusting and not a real woman”. I acknowledge that he’s not the mainstream. I do not see how he is funny, and would go so far as to venture that perhaps men who find him funny or endearing can find the root of their problems with women right there.
“There’s a small kernel of truth in the idea that some “beta†things are a turnoff – a man who does act like a doormat all the time and puts all women on a pedestal can be hard to respect, and it’ll often feel like they’re worshipping a girlfriend rather than connecting with her”
I can relate to this..I was in a relationship with a man who did act like a doormat…I however didn’t immediately dump him to the curb…I started teaching him to be more assertive, and circumstances changed and I had to move to another state…and not only was it hard to teach assertiveness in an environment that had us both in unfamiliar territories (him without me by his side, and me exploring a new state and freedom), but it started to become that he would have anxieties about the possibility of me meeting other guys and while he would have these anxieties he wouldn’t express them until he was taking an accusatory tone (which I guess is the alpha/beta dynamic some PUAs would acknowledge as good for a relationship, but not one I responded to well)…I still had contact with him and encouraged him to approach women or men that he was interested in…We were best friends in our relationship and best friends after…I have never remained friends with an Alpha, and they are the least memorable of my experiences.
“he wouldn’t express them until he was taking an accusatory tone (which I guess is the alpha/beta dynamic some PUAs would acknowledge as good for a relationship, but not one I responded to well)”
Not necessarily. The cleverer PUAs would say that the ideal here would be not to be jealous or show jealousy; the less clever ones would suggest pulling away a little emotionally to make you miss him more – to put you on the defensive where he believed he was on the defensive. The really stupid ones would probably suggest subconsciously trying to make the friends or acquaintances he was jealous of look bad to you.
(The genuinely good advice would be to cultivate trust in the relationship and confidence in himself so that jealousy was less of an issue, and also possibly to tell you when he was having bouts of jealousy that he wasn’t dealing with well, whilst acknowledging that they were irrational and he intended to ignore them.)
“The genuinely good advice would be to cultivate trust in the relationship and confidence in himself so that jealousy was less of an issue, and also possibly to tell you when he was having bouts of jealousy that he wasn’t dealing with well, whilst acknowledging that they were irrational and he intended to ignore them.”
Which is exactly what I was trying to do in the first place…unfortunately, the more irrational one gets…(possibly because of the anxiety he was facing)…the less rational thought made it through…I tried…but we both agreed to end it amicably..
I sure wish you had a blog Graphite…you don’t by any chance do you?
Thanks! I’m thinking about starting one this December; my main issue is trying to decide whether to write under my real name, my usual internet name (this one), or an entirely new pseudonym, and which people would be allowed to know about it from the internet and the real world. Anonymity is complicated/ I’ll let you know via your blog if I do go through with it
that would be cool!
“The cleverer PUAs would say that the ideal here would be not to be jealous or show jealousy; the less clever ones would suggest pulling away a little emotionally to make you miss him more – to put you on the defensive where he believed he was on the defensive.”
I’ve had that pulled on me before…but I doubt the guy was a PUA or at least probably didn’t identify as one…the relationship fizzled…which I’m sure led to the possibility of him thinking I was a “bitch” even though he never would have stated that to me, but he could have said that to his friends…and yeah…self-fulfilling prophecies ensue…is that was is referred to as the feedback loop?
*was = what…errrr… I’ve been awfully incoherent lately…I’ll blame it on my cold…
Geez, someone above said the only good penis is a soft penis. Must have feminists getting soft in the head. Back in the day, we said the only good penis was a chopped off penis thrown to the piranah!
La Lubu – in PUA parlance, an Alpha Male is meant to be someone who puts themselves first and does not suppicate to others, and who is not afraid of rejection.
Somewhat to my surprise, I discover that I’ve never actually dated an Alpha Male
.
All this time, I was assuming it was any guy who was particularly confident and skilled at anything that might make him stand out – which is a much more appealing quality when looking for someone to date.
“who is not afraid of rejection.” I thought it was impossible for men to overcome this fear without the help from women..or namely feminists in regards to their discourse that male sexuality is inherently dangerous, or was that really a call for reconciling feminist discourse with PUA, and if it is a call for reconciling, then simply dismissing feminist analysis of PUA tactics is well…selfish/entitled, since in order for a reconciling to occur it will not simply mean one party conceding to the other.
In answer to the question about what an “alpha male” is, the short and simple answer (and this is the real, not the exclusively PUA/Seduction Community answer), is that an alpha is a socially dominant male and leader within their social group, nothing more, nothing less. Male social dynamics tend to break down into alpha/beta (and, arguably, omega) roles: alphas are leaders, betas are followers, and omegas are outsiders. Alpha and beta dynamics are not inherently conflictual or oppositional: men tend to settle into social hierarchies relatively quickly and naturally (compared to women, who more often tend to reach an overt consensus and harmony that masks and sublimates the hierarchical and conflictual dimensions of their interactions). My belief is that we men relation this way because our social interactions contain a greater risk of interpersonal violence, making settling the question of who stands where in the hierarchy an important one to settle early on before someone gets punched (want to watch a bar fight? Go during “garbage hour” after 11 pm or so and watch the guys who aren’t part of a larger, mixed-sex group or already holding an individual woman’s attention: you’ll see the betas fighting it out over the few scraps of social influence and attention left to them at that point).
Genuine alpha males tend to be “leaders of men” and promote social inclusion and participation, rather than feeling the need to try to dominate social interactions. They don’t need to try to dominate because they already do so. If you want a more comprehensive and positive definition of alpha males, I’d look here: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/alphabehavior.htm
Being an alpha male tends to, either because of the nature of what it is (being socially facile and dominant) or because of some EvPsych reason having to do with providing resources or somesuch, carry with it sexual desirability for men. That means that men who want to be desirable want to either be, or appear to be, alpha males.
The PUA/Seduction Community/game scene tries to teach those who aren’t alphas how to be or to act like them. A lot of the deeper levels of that particular discourse are more in the “acts like” category, teaching their scripts and using their kind of culty, NLP/Ross Jeffries cant for boiling down social relations into some sort of formula that, in just seven days, can make you a man. Where I would say that that scene sees most of its legitimate value for most men, if it does at all, boils down to three simple things: 1) gives them a prompt to “come out of their shell” and not be afraid to talk to women; 2) de-pedestalizes women for men who still do that and teaches them not to invest so much personal and emotional energy into one woman or one interaction with a woman (lets remember that pedestalization and disdain are often two reactionary sides of the same coin, and can be equally misogynistic); and 3) encourages a dispassionate, objective and critical view of one’s social presentation and social position. (anyone who thinks that any of us ever “be ourselves” in a social setting and don’t put considerable effort into controlling other’s impressions of us should read Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”… which he wrote 50 years ago!) Most of the rest of the dialog in that community as presented online, beyond those kernels, tends towards personal puffery of various internet studs’ sexual prowess, or else omega males desperately seeking ways of taking out their isolation, pain, and anger on women through sexual degradation and vilification in the manner that FormerWildChild described.
At the risk of sounding all disgusting and fawning, I would have said this first if I had come into this discussion earlier: Hugo, you are one of the few, maybe the only, who has put these lines of discourse into a constructive interplay, such that perhaps we have the opportunity to work toward integrating them into a synthetic whole. That you may, in your own eyes, have done a “poor job”, matters much the less than that you have done a “job” of it at all, and I think that we’re all having a productive discussion with a lot of food for though for it.
Erm, *thought*, above.
Genuine alpha males tend to be “leaders of men†and promote social inclusion and participation, rather than feeling the need to try to dominate social interactions.
Digression – one of the things that makes popular usage of the term “alpha male” really weird to me, is when people get into discussions of whether various male political leaders are “alpha males” (e.g. “Is Obama an alpha male?” Hello, he’s President; doesn’t that make him an alpha male practically by definition?). It seems to me that, if “alpha” has any real meaning when transposed from discussions of wolves and alpha mating pairs to discussions of people, anyone, man or woman, who ever had a serious shot at winning the Presidency would count as “alpha.”
“Digression – one of the things that makes popular usage of the term “alpha male†really weird to me, is when people get into discussions of whether various male political leaders are “alpha males†(e.g. “Is Obama an alpha male?†Hello, he’s President; doesn’t that make him an alpha male practically by definition?). It seems to me that, if “alpha†has any real meaning when transposed from discussions of wolves and alpha mating pairs to discussions of people, anyone, man or woman, who ever had a serious shot at winning the Presidency would count as “alpha.—
Since we’re talking about male hierarchies…could it be the question is raised simply by giving women the right to vote? Like if most men voted the president in, and no women (who are not included in the male hierarchy, or are essentially past omega…or omega?)would there be a question if the elected was alpha?
So does the construction of male hierarchies depend on the existence of women? If women didn’t exist, would there still be a need for the social hierarchies? If these social hierarchies depend on the existence of women wouldn’t it seem women are essentially in all meanings of the word considered objects/prizes?
Do you have the same attitude towards women playing traditional gender roles in order to get a date? Is lipstick dehumanizing and anti-feminist?
Dude, yes, I have a beef with women who are Patriarchy 2K compliant. Is that so hard for you to imagine? I am very happy to criticize women who perform femininity and the foolish men like you who perform masculinity. When I say that I reject traditional gender roles, I’m not being hypocritical. I think all of you are fools for seeking out life partners who are interested in playing games with gender scripts and restrictive roles.
However, I understand the pressure to comply; in some places, women who don’t perform femininity and men who don’t perform masculinity get beaten up for it, or worse. So I don’t blame people for conforming to society’s gender rules if I don’t know why they are conforming. In the discussion in this thread, however, it’s clear that the reason to conform to a traditional version of masculinity is to get dates. All right, cool. Pretend to be someone other than yourself in order to attract a woman who’s pretending to be someone other than herself. Have fun with that.
Why you’d want to bother, I can’t imagine. But I hope the rewards are worth all the time and effort you put into learning scripts and playacting.
I’ll ditto Tom’s Hugo, you are one of the few, maybe the only, who has put these lines of discourse into a constructive interplay, such that perhaps we have the opportunity to work toward integrating them into a synthetic whole. Funnily enough, the only person who I think does a better job of it, anywhere I’ve seen, is Clarisse.
I would like to offer a defense of the non-alpha guys and put to rest this idea that feminists believe that the only worthwhile penis is one detached or flaccid. A “turgid†healthy penis is a thing of beauty. I love how they look, taste and the amazing things they can do. Having said that, if I had a choice between alpha men and a world without the great and lovely cock, I am afraid I would die a sad and lonely woman, or finally figure out that whole being a lesbian thing. Alpha guys, no offense, tend to not be a lot of fun in bed. They know what they are doing (they think) and they are so busy seducing the woman that they don’t allow for that wonderful spontaneous fun that comes with genuine reciprocity.
Women who are experienced enough to know how to get good sex when they want it know to pick a non-alpha guy. The trick is to find a guy who does not have a chip on his shoulder, and who has that genuine kindness in his eyes. Then take him home and show him the time of his life.
Non-alpha guys have the one wonderful thing that alpha men almost never have: gratitude. They are not thinking “Damn, those are some ugly thighs.†They are thinking, “Holy God, this feels so much better than my hand.†You don’t have to pretend with these guys or worry about how your gut looks in that position. You don’t need to act as if you aren’t experienced. They love it when you use the little tricks that you have picked up along the years. They are teachable. In fact, they really appreciate it when you say, “slow down there, sweetie, let me show you how that likes to be touched.” And when you say, “Mmm, no, I don’t want to do that. How about if we… instead?” They don’t sulk about the refusal and they cheerfully take you up on your suggestion.
My advice to non-alpha guys, ditch the PUA crap. There are many of us who really enjoy you just the way you are. We treasure your geeky charm.
“Women who are experienced enough to know how to get good sex when they want it know to pick a non-alpha guy. The trick is to find a guy who does not have a chip on his shoulder, and who has that genuine kindness in his eyes. Then take him home and show him the time of his life. ”
that self defense site listed up there explains a LOT about the backlash on feminism…The TRUE alpha males aren’t the ones bickering over how feminism ruined their life…Before feminism men had a monopoly on resources…they had nothing threatening their all male system of hierarchy…when women started taking jobs and started stating their rights they took away the monopoly men had on resources, thus the bickering extended out from men into women because we gained resources…the betas that want to be alphas are fighting feminism…the TRUE alphas are pro feminist men…the ones that are avoiding violence..not just physical violence…the site mentions to women that a man who walks away from the verbal fight isn’t doing so out of disrespect, he’s conceding to your victory by avoiding violence…thus establishing you are the alpha (the one who keeps order and looks out for the interest of the group)…seriously that site totally opened my eyes…I’m not quite sure how what feminist women would perceive as anti-feminist women would fit into the picture because the structure of women’s hierarchies isn’t something that’s really documented…
Many seem to conflate “degree of compliance and acceptation of gender roles” with “gender identity”, even trans people do often.
Gender identity, more appropriately called sexual identity, is how you prefer your body to be configured. Some people have no preference (just go with what they got, and whatever). Zoe Brain has a theory that those “go with the flow” people are roughly 1/3 of people. 1/3 strongly identify as male, and 1/3 strongly identify as female (ie if they were given the wrong plumbing, those people would notice, even on their own).
I always had a strong identity as female, knew from the age of 8 that something serious was amiss (and thought conspiracy theories about being abducted, operated to look male down there and then adopted)…and yet was a gifted child, with Asperger’s on top.
Oh, and I was really not compliant with a male gender role. I did what I thought would avoid me the gender police (stayed away from pink, shiny, pretty stuff as much as possible), but ended up leaving very obvious clues I didn’t even know I had (how I walked and ran, body language).
I’m not sure how body language and walk is innate or learned – but for certain, mine was unaffected (being Aspie, I had no idea what was expected of me)
The theory that how you walk depends on having something between the legs you don’t want to ‘hurt’, and that men swagger because of this…is not something I subscribe to. I got that junk, and never walked with a swagger, ever.
Thanks for the “alpha male” references. After discovering that PUA is a real thing in the real world (which was helpful, because it gave me a handy explanation for why “all” the single men turned into assholes overnight….thanks to “the neg”), I’ve been mystified by the fluidity of the definition. Like Lynn, I was confused by the use of “alpha male” in political campaigns; if it was just supposed to be about leadership, why would there need to be tweaking of a facade on a proven leader?
So, I assumed (for my own personal use) that “alpha male” was synonymous with “arrogant, boorish ass”. Someone who seeks to elevate himself by lowering others.
Yet, I do know some men IRL who’ve either…taken time to learn how not to be a doormat, who’ve used the term “alpha male”. I know these guys weren’t seeking to be anti-social clods. And a really good friend of mine once described himself as an “alpha male” in conversation (he was critiquing some other mutual acquaintances for their lack of courage—and in this instance, he was right); I was…surprised that he would use what I regarded as a pretentious term, but his definition was more of what I’d call a “stand-up guy”—right or wrong, stand up for what you believe in, and own it, even if you do so at risk to yourself.
But what still rubs me the wrong way about the term is….there is no role for women in that scenario, other than “submissive” or “follower”—neither of which I have any interest in being. So, that terminology or scenario is still leaving a lot of women out of the equation. And I’m tired of being told that we—the women responsding on this thread, and overwhelming majority of the women I know IRL—are “outliers” because we don’t subscribe to this view. We’re not perfect feminist saints (and I know many women who wouldn’t call themselves “feminist”, though they move through life for all practical intents and purposes as one)—it’s just….
…life shapes us. And life has shaped a great deal of women to be unable to respond to the so-called “traditional” roles (“traditional” in quotes because let’s face it….traditions have always changed, and fairly rapidly in the past 100-150 years. Women of my background have been stereotyped as ball-busting bitches for generations now because of our independence, but that independence pre-dated feminism. Feminism didn’t come to Middle-of-Nowhere, Sicily, but husbands left for other countries, and sometimes they didn’t come back—they died, or abandoned the wife and kids back home. Stuff like that always happened on an individual level, but in my great-grandmothers day, it was happening on a universal level—as in, over half the population was emigrating…)
What I’m trying to get at is, there is a gaping chasm between this theory and real life. If PUA is supposed to be about maximizing opportunities of previously shy or socially awkward men to get dates, why choose a system that is immediately going to turn off a big swath of the female population? It is the rare woman who is going to be able to function in life by playing the role that evo-psych fans want her to. As we say on my block, “she’s gonna have her ass handed to her.” Those women are the outliers—the women with the necessary financial and social privilege to let someone else do the (literal and metaphorical) heavy lifting.
I think there’s a fundamental disconnect going on between what men attracted to PUA systems regard as “masculine”, and what heterosexual women (in the general population) regard as masculine. I’m not interpreting the “doormat” routine as unmanly—just as un-adult. Childlike. And that’s a turnoff. “For Christ’s sake, grow up already”, is what I’m thinking—not “butch up.” As a woman who’s had adult responsbilities and expectations since grade school, I have zero patience with full-grown men who still want someone to be Mommy or Daddy for them.
Gender identity, more appropriately called sexual identity, is how you prefer your body to be configured. Some people have no preference (just go with what they got, and whatever). Zoe Brain has a theory that those “go with the flow†people are roughly 1/3 of people.
I would definitely be in that “go with the flow” 1/3; I’ve never felt that there was anything wrong with the female body I have, but also never felt there would be anything wrong with my body if I suddenly woke up with a male one. It makes it harder to understand the drive behind trans identities (or strongly felt cis ones), but at the same time easy to accept people as the gender/sex they’ve managed now to display; OK, now you look female, so what do I care what chromosomes you started out with?
(want to watch a bar fight? Go during “garbage hour†after 11 pm or so and watch the guys who aren’t part of a larger, mixed-sex group or already holding an individual woman’s attention: you’ll see the betas fighting it out over the few scraps of social influence and attention left to them at that point).
I’ve never seen this happen. Ever. All the bar fights I’ve seen either resulted from some guy insulting or grabbing some other guy’s wife or girlfriend, or they’ve been stupid, drunken misunderstandings between male friends who were so drunk they could barely stand up, much less remember what the hell it was they were supposed to be fighting about.
Not that I don’t believe you…just that this isn’t a universal experience. Where I come from, women are wary of men who fight for reasons other than self-defense or defending someone else. It’s shorthand for “spends a lot of time in jail; probably “earns” his living from petty crime and mooching off girlfriends (or Mom).”
Thought I’d mention this…
Not sure if that is anything like pro-feminist pickup, but late last night, I met a law-school student sitting at a bar (through eye contact). We started chatting, and early on in the conversation, I actually used one of the (I think better) questions mentioned in “the game” – “which superpower would you choose if you could pick one?” and based on her answer about human rights advocacy, religion, anthropology, and gender issues in Islamic countries, we ended up having a longer discussion about gender roles, manliness and feminism. At a bar, at 4 am. (Actually, that has happened before – and for some women being a guy who thinks about such issues and is able to formulate them seems to have been a bit of an aphrodisiac…) So far we only picked up each others facebook details, but she’s working at a bar I occasionally go to, so this “discussion” will be continuted…
The weird thing is, that, while I first read that question in “the game”, and I think it’s a really good question, if asked about it, I would always say that it’s from a book called “1000 great questions to make conversation” or so – which is also true, but I read it first in “the game”, I think.
Alpha is purely a functional distinction. Is President Obama an alpha male? Yes, by definition. His role puts him at the head of a lot of social hierarchies, and within his own social circle, I’m sure that he predominates. Is Bill Gates an alpha male? Try to imagine, for a moment, a stereotypical bar lout, biker, or frat boy trying to pick a fight with Bill Gates and how quickly they would be removed by security. The point is that being an “alpha male” does not determine one’s specific performance of masculinity but rather how well one is performing in that role.
There are “insecure alphas”, betas who are thrust into the role by default, and who do a poor job of it. (Machiavelli would have said that they owe their place purely to fortune rather than virtue.) For any students of modern Chinese political history, Hua Guofeng, who was briefly Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic for a few years after Mao until Deng Xiaoping consolidated his power and supplanted him, was probably a quintessential example.
@La Lubu: I can’t speak to the specific social circumstances and environment that you inhabit, which by your previous descriptions seems rather different from mine. Be that as it may, I didn’t say that fighting was a particularly effective tactic for getting women’s attention (except perhaps to get them to try to step in and prevent or mediate it). Alcohol and insecurity often tend to push things into a life of their own. Splitting the difference between perspectives, the last bar fight I was involved in was partially driven by competing for the attention of a woman who turned out to already have a boyfriend who was neither me nor the other guy.
“I’ve never seen this happen. Ever. All the bar fights I’ve seen either resulted from some guy insulting or grabbing some other guy’s wife or girlfriend, or they’ve been stupid, drunken misunderstandings between male friends who were so drunk they could barely stand up, much less remember what the hell it was they were supposed to be fighting about.”
Insulting is not assertive, it’s aggressive…so the insulter was projecting his insecurities of the lack of control of the situation through verbal insults…simply stated, he didn’t have boundaries..he didn’t know where the line was and he crossed it…chances are he felt his boundaries were stepped on when the guy physically attacked him…while the law may be on the verbal aggressors side, the physical attack was indeed assertive reaction to aggressive behavior…unless the violence was taken to the extreme (once your opponent no longer poses a threat the violence needs to stop)…
Your second part of that statement would be agreed upon by true alpha males, it would be a stupid disagreement probably based on one or both parties not knowing how to respect each others boundaries, or not having established boundaries… I have that site book marked…some good stuff there..
Tom,
“The point is that being an “alpha male†does not determine one’s specific performance of masculinity but rather how well one is performing in that role.”
I’d tend to disagree on that. I think that “alpha” is characterised by specific behavioral markers that don’t depend no institutional backup at all. I think what you seem to call “omega” is clearly “alpha”. I think there are other words that try to capture the essence thereof, like “charisma” or “gravitas”, “personality” in the non-descriptive notion. You can have a homeless person without a penny in their shabby coat who exhibits that kind of “alpha” behaviour, and you can have CEOs who don’t. I’m a bit mystified with respect to people like Silvio Berlusconi. They are, but they are also douchebags. And I’d like to exclude douchebaggery from any definition of “alpha behaviour”. People can certainly change their outlook and behaviour, at least to a degree, but it’s not something that is mainly institutional, in my opinion. I believe that for most women, that alpha behaviour is something that will be a more powerful part of attraction than social/financial status or visual attractivity.
But I agree that it’s something with an elusive essence.
Sam, whatever happened to the girl that kissed you at the party not too long ago?
@Hugh: Thanks to for the Kerr link; that looks interesting! And I absolutely agree with much of what you say: I’m not under the illusion that I and my friends are “the default human being”, or typical of something — as I explicitly said in my original comment, I’m not trying to generalise my own experience here.
What I disagree is when you seem to be doing exactly that yourself: your implicit assumption that there is a “default human being”, or at least some kind of typical American mainstream culture, and that your advice and experience applies to it. I’m sure your advice applies to the subculture you’re part of, and probably to some others as well. But are you talking yuppies in San Francisco? Partiers in Vegas? Hippy farmers in NoCal? Poor immigrant farmers in New Mexico? Poor white farmers in Bible belt Texas? Young drifters in Miami? Blue-collar families in Pennsylvania? Devout Mormon towns in Utah? Native American tribal communities in Wyoming? All these groups have different gender rôles, different scripts and pressures; and of course they’re still far from being monolithic blocks in that respect! Unless you’re really claiming your observations apply to all these communities, it would be more useful to tell us where you’re coming from and whom you’re talking about, rather than just making blanket statements and writing the rest of us off as atypical subcultures.
There are certainly some generalisations that can be drawn across many or most American subcultures (e.g. some form of machismo usually exists, I think). But if you want to do that, you gotta make some kind of argument for it, rather than just stating it in an authoritative tone of voice while the rest of us stand around disagreeing!
I’ll also ditto Tom’s and Brian’s thanks to Hugo and Clarisse for leading a seriously thoughtful debate on a difficult, often-avoided and often badly-handled topic.
Though I agree that this discussion needs to be had, a lot of this dogmatic “male hierarchy” talk is a bit mystifying. You guys do realize that women follow their own hierarchy as well, right? If all women shut out “non-alpha” men… well, there would be a lot of lonely women in the world.
Neither is this hierarchy as rigid as many of you suggest- there is physical appearance, there is the “social alpha” (ie, charisma), there is physical prowess, etc. We’re a lot more complicated than animals.
kristina,
“Sam, whatever happened to the girl that kissed you at the party not too long ago?”
reply in the other thread.
Peter,
“If all women shut out “non-alpha†men… well, there would be a lot of lonely women in the world.”
I think there are. I think the if left to their own non-socially mediated devices, humans have a tendency to be tricked by their own wiring, women just like men. Historically, about 45% of men reproduced, while about 90% of women did. So shutting out non-alpha men may mean different things. Apparently women didn’t have to settle that much, at least for reproduction. Interestingly, it was the Western implementation of the core family that seems to have equalized reproduction rates.
Graphite said:
In context, there were a couple particular critics of Roissy that were the topic of discussion. My claim was not that all of Roissy’s critics are biased and don’t know how reality works.
I’m perfectly fine with you not sharing my sense of humor. Yes, I ran into Roissy’s blog every once in a while, and he was able to tickle my funny bone, particularly with posts like this. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have problems with him, even then, nor that I found everything he said funny.
Sounds like we have a lot of agreement. Roissy’s advice is indeed pretty narrow and oversimplified. Unfortunately, it seems to be sufficiently useful to some types of guys that he can help build a following.
Yes, Sam, if I wasn’t clear enough I’m under the assumption we are having this discussion in regards to modern monogamy, not the gender dynamics of hunter-gatherers. Your point?
Sam:
“Not sure if that is anything like pro-feminist pickup, but late last night, I met a law-school student sitting at a bar (through eye contact). We started chatting, and early on in the conversation, I actually used one of the (I think better) questions mentioned in “the game†– “which superpower would you choose if you could pick one?†and based on her answer about human rights advocacy, religion, anthropology, and gender issues in Islamic countries, we ended up having a longer discussion about gender roles, manliness and feminism. At a bar, at 4 am. ”
I would say that is a perfect example of this nebulous thing called pro-feminist pickup that we’re trying to grasp. In “The Game”, those questions are often designed both to give a man the confidence to go over and say anything at all to a woman – that is, in the same way that someone who is nervous about their own capacity to generate interesting conversation without any prior thought – and also to appeal to women. Neil Strauss doesn’t actually seem to give much weight to any of the answers given by the women he starts conversations with using these “openers”. You’ve made that script feminist, I think, by using it as a tool to connect with a woman on a human level and have an interesting conversation with her, where the Strausses of the world have tended to use it as a tool only to impress women with their perceived conversational prowess.
(Ideally, you would tell her where you got the question originally, for the twofold reason that it is honest and that it fosters your ability to communicate truthfully with this particular woman, laying a groundwork in your mind for future honesty in case you do end up dating her.)
I also want to note that I don’t think using an opening line you’ve read elsewhere is in any way inherently dishonest or deceptive; given that we pick up tidbits of interesting conversation everywhere we go, and given that some socially challenged people will indeed study correct modes of social interaction, the only way the use of an “opener” could be dishonest were if you were using it in the Neil Strauss way – because you wanted only to use it to “open” and impress the woman, and you found neither the question nor the prospect of hearing her answer and discussing it interesting.
*”that is, in the same way that someone who is nervous about their own capacity to generate interesting conversation without any prior thought might practice saying hello”
I think there are other words that try to capture the essence thereof, like “charisma†or “gravitasâ€, “personality†in the non-descriptive notion.
Women, of course, don’t have charisma, gravitas or personality. In the PUA worldview, that’s irrelevant. In the worldview of…most of the living, breathing, nontheoretical men of my acquaintance—that’s everything. More important than looks, because pretty women are everywhere. So again….who is PUA helping?
Because (not to call you out in particular, Sam, but you have spent a great deal of time on this blog going over the topic and seem to be open to using yourself and your experiences as an example)—how has this helped you? I ask because it seems you’re having more conversations and sometimes kissing, but you don’t appear to be satisfied with the type of relationships you’re finding. I assume the PUA techniques have gotten you laid more (or else why would you still be using them)….but you wouldn’t be on this blog complaining if you were getting what you wanted. It seems to me that you want to be able to seamlessly blend PUA and feminist approaches to meeting sexual partners (perhaps to increase the variety of women you can attract?), but those two approaches are contradictory. You can’t have it both ways.
I also think it’s a construct of masculinity in many areas of US culture that quantity of sexual partners trumps quality—the guy with the most notches on his bedpost “wins” (or is “the Alpha”). It’s the opposite for women…too many sexual partners (who decides the “too many”? anyone. our sex lives, real or imagined, are always up for discussion….that’s a whole ‘nother post, though)—and we lose “femininity”. Ain’t that a groove? Too much sex and you’re no longer feminine?
But that aspect of (anxious?) masculinity drives that push for numbers. Why, you’d have to tell me. I have yet to meet a woman who is impressed by a man’s number of sexual partners.
I’m kind of dubious on the alpha, beta, omega stuff. People are more complex than that. I’m with kristina—most of those “alpha” markers seem to point to insecurity and anxiety, which is supposed to be the opposite of alpha. Most of the “beta” markers (like stability, reason, responsibility, consideration) are recognized as inherent qualities of the mature masculine in damn near every culture….so why wouldn’t that be “alpha”? Add in the fact that modern lives are complex, and that we don’t all have the same rank in every facet of our lives (nor do most of us want that—being the “leader” everywhere means never getting to put one’s feet up…there’s a reason the phrase “burnout” was coined)…and it’s clearer those terms are simple replacements for a more complex reality….with all the failures that entails.
Peter said:
I consider it self-evident that gender dynamics exist in dating within most mainstream subcultures. To confirm this notion, go out to any social gathering of mainstream people where people might meet dates, and watch. Since you’re in college, you can try going to a frat party.
There are additional lines of evidence you can look into about gender dynamics other than mere observation.
The thing is, traits aren’t distributed evenly through the population. Intelligence isn’t distributed evenly. Height isn’t distributed evenly. Psychology has discovered that a lot of traits follow a normal distribution (aka Gaussian distribution, or bell curve).
In a normal distribution, most people are clustered around the average. The farther you go from the average, the less people you find.
My intuition is that attraction to gender-typical traits is shaped something like a normal distribution: most people are closest to the average than to any other point. That’s why PUAs care so much about the preferences of average women. The preferences of any random woman you meet are more likely to be closer to the average woman’s preferences than to any other point on the normal distribution. When a PUA has limited knowledge of a woman, the safest assumption is that she works like the average woman in her subculture. Safest does not mean correct, of course.
The question we are exploring is: where is the average for female gender preferences in men? Are women in this thread near the average, or are they somewhere in the left tail while most women are clustered around a much more gendered set of preferences? My intuition is the latter.
Another way of conceptualizing notions of gender typicality comes from Gangestad et al. They took a large sample of people and gave them tests on gender-related traits, attitudes, and childhood feelings. They found that people fell into two clusters (i.e. “taxa”). 85% of men where in a gender-typical taxon, and 15% of men where the odd men out in terms of gender traits (most of the queer men were in the latter taxon). 90-95% of women fit into a gender-typical taxon based on their interests and traits, while 5-10% of women were in a gender-atypical taxon (which also contained most of the queer women).
Basically, 90-95% of women work similarly to each in terms of gender-related traits, and 5-10% are wired a different way. I would speculate that the majority of cluster of people matches pretty well onto what we might call “mainstream” culture, while certain “alternative subcultures” (e.g. punk, hippie, hipster, goth, geek, emo, feminist, queer) are composed mainly of people from the gender-atypical taxon.
Gangestad et al. didn’t measure preferences in mates, but it’s reasonable to hypothesize that people in the gender-typical taxon prefer gender-typical mates, while people in the gender-atypical taxon prefer gender-atypical mates.
If it’s the case that women in this thread fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon, then the max percentage of women who would be similar would be 5-10%. The rest of female humanity would work differently. How differently does the majority of women work? Do they work like PUAs think? I don’t know. The point is that there is a big jump between the sorts of women posting in this thread, and 90-95% of women.
There are a couple other lines of evidence to think about gender and gendered preferences, but I’ll leave you with this for now.
You DO realize that the “How are you” in mundane conversation rarely merits an honest answer – because the asker is rarely looking to find out for real (unless family maybe). And that’s an unusual conversation opener, on top. You rarely tell that person “Oh my back, and that gastro I had all week.”, the expected answer is a variation of “Fine, and you?”.
So yeah, I wouldn’t be so quick to judge Neil Strauss badly if more than half the population does it already.
Graphite said:
I think we’re making some progress here, and I concur with your analysis. As I argued in my Pickup and Seduction Techniques for Feminists post on my blog, I’ve long felt that there are many ideas and techniques in the seduction community that are highly positive and ethical, and perhaps even could be liked by feminists with just a little tweaking. When I see feminist perspectives that are categorically negative towards the seduction community, it makes me feel that they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Graphite said:
Btw, what makes you say that Strauss doesn’t find women’s answers interesting, or the discussion that might result? Maybe I’m just biased, because I can’t help finding people and their perspectives interesting. I guess I never got the memo that it was supposed to just be a ploy to impress women, and that I’m not actually supposed to be interested in what she has to say. Dammit, I must have been doing this pickup thing wrong for years…
IMO, Neil Strauss, from what you say, simply found more original conversation starters than “How are you?” or talk about the weather. Most people don’t want to hear the most private thoughts of someone on first meet…they want the surface stuff first.
At least I wouldn’t go asking something like “How do you see the meaning of life?” and expect an honest thought-out answer, from a stranger I just met. If I did, they might think I’m pretty weird for honestly expecting an answer to that, while not even knowing them. That’s something you can ask down the way, probably not the first night even (even if conversation lasts hours like Sam’s) – by then you probably will truly care about their answer.
In conversations with people I just met, I’m pretty pragmatic, because while I respect their value as human, they’re not someone I particularly care for at the time (even as I might be interested in friendship or dating – I can’t know for sure then…looks can be deceiving, and I don’t rely on looks to pick partners, or friends). So I end up asking stuff I want to know about them, maybe find common interest, maybe find red flags, and then decide if continuing is okay or worth it (If I get obvious signs that they’d be trans bashers, I won’t stick around).
Graphite,
I’ve never met Strauss, and for all the tidbits in the book, I’ve seen it as a cautionary tale, about how relying entirely on process is dangerous, that this, like any other, language cannot be used to communicate if it’s only the words thrown around.
You can easily construct syntactically correct sentences without saying *anything*. I thought that was his main message. Learn the grammar, but don’t forget to put *yourself* in the content.
Or, as a quote I read in some review of the book, and remembered because I thought it’s actually really good advice for the semantical structure of all conversations: “be interesting AND interested.”
“You’ve made that script feminist, I think, by using it as a tool to connect with a woman on a human level and have an interesting conversation with her, where the Strausses of the world have tended to use it as a tool only to impress women with their perceived conversational prowess.”
Hmm, I wouldn’t have called that feminist. But what’s the point of impressing someone if you *don’t* want to connect with them? I mean, a debate club seems better to impress people with my conversational prowess, if it’s only for that, no?
Sam said:
Because if you’re a guy trying to impress someone, it’s because you just want to get laid, right? At least, unless a PUA explicitly says that he wants a real connection when discussing a technique, the assumption is that he doesn’t care about a connection.
I would dispute that assumption. It’s possible that some PUAs don’t talk about the amazingness of connections with women because they don’t care about those connections. Alternatively, it could be that having a real connection goes without saying, or is left up to the individual PUA. It would certainly be awkward for PUAs to tack “…and this gives me a real connection with her” onto the end of every paragraph.
La Lubu,
“Women, of course, don’t have charisma, gravitas or personality.”
Oh, c’mon. Yes, they can, and those women who do are called “Alpha Women”…
“—how has this helped you?”
Well, reading SC stuff was really only a part of my multi-year effort to come to terms with my delayed pyscho-sexual development. So, it’s hard to say what part that element specifically played. I’m eclectic. I needed to theoretically take apart radical feminism and understand how religious sexuality discourses are construced and play out socially. How attitudes towards sexuality change cyclically. I read about anthropology, mating biology, evolutionary psychology, and, of course, feminist theory. A also read a lot of self help books on dating and sexuality that aren’t part of the SC self-help literature, and I also read some of that, although I usually ended up reading the academic sources of the SC versions. I think apart from some conversational elements like the one I mentioned above, I think I’ve used the SC material mostly for learning to apply my own body-language, or, how to project male energy, walking, standing at a bar, taking space. You said that’s the stuff that comes naturally to the guys around you, I had to learn it, and I’m only 5.7, and that’s often an issue for women. I knew I had it down when a guy came over to me while I was speaking with a girl and asked me how to be as relaxed and still be as present. Maybe the fact that I am a pretty good actor helped with visualization and the performance bit. I think the single biggest thing was a story I took out of the film “Hitch” (if you want to count that as SC) – which led directly to being kissed for the first time in my life.
I’ve always been good with words, and I’ve always been a rather outgoing character. But I hid my sexuality entirely due to feminism , religion, and my personality, and had to work hard to allow myself to let it out, if only a bit. Reading SC material was one part of that process, and it’s hard to say how much of it. But the entire process has allowed myself to reconnect to an important part of myself, which, to me, was possibly life-changing.
“but you wouldn’t be on this blog complaining if you were getting what you wanted.”
I’m a bit disappointed that you assume I’m only talking about this because it’s important to me.
“It seems to me that you want to be able to seamlessly blend PUA and feminist approaches to meeting sexual partners (perhaps to increase the variety of women you can attract?), but those two approaches are contradictory.”
No, I’m trying to find *my* way, and it’s a journey rather than a single trip. I’m learning things in every dialogue, on or offline. And if I’m lucky, whoever is talking to me will have also learned something.
“But that aspect of (anxious?) masculinity drives that push for numbers. Why, you’d have to tell me. I have yet to meet a woman who is impressed by a man’s number of sexual partners.”
Let me tell you that too few are apparently much more of a turnoff.
“I’m kind of dubious on the alpha, beta, omega stuff. People are more complex than that.”
Absolutely. They’re merely a simple model. But we need some kind of structure to cluster behaviour… I’m not sure this is the appropriate model. But it’s a starting point.
Going on forty years ago, I was a fraternity grad adviser. I knew some guys who were frustrated, some nearly to tears, by their inability to find a woman who would think them worthy…of anything.
In their world, I guess that meant dating them.
Thing is, they weren’t worthy. They were jumped-up high school guys with a couple of years of extended adolescence–college–tacked on top. They had accomplished little save getting through high school and had few usable real-world capabilities.
And they saw the guys with the easy social lives were the traditionally masculine guys. Had to be a lesson there, someplace.
Traditional masculinity isn’t a label without substance. It includes certain characteristics. These include increased interest in risk-taking, increased interest in testing oneself, increased interest in pushing various envelopes.
These lead to confidence, itself a tell or proxy for competence.
Which in turn leads to more confidence, which leads, as positive feedback, to more stretching.
It isn’t necessary to be, say, all conference on the football team, or even a starter. In a school of five hundred guys, four hundred and sixty aren’t on the football team, four hundred and eighty-five aren’t on the wrestling team, four hundred and eighty aren’t on the business/marketing team that made state finals.
Even the football benchwarmer knows he has learned some difficult skill sets, has the physical courage to hit and take hits, sometimes from bigger, stronger guys, and the moral courage to keep showing up knowing he won’t get much playing time.
It gets to be something like Tom Wolfe’s Seventies essay, The Truest Sport, in which the participants achieve a goal, which he likens to struggling through a door, to find oneself in a room with another door on the far side, and so on. At each step, some guys don’t make it. At the end, the few find themselves jousting with Sam and Charlie. (And he uses a long, long run-on sentence to terrific effect.)
As you accomplish things, you know you are moving through the rooms/doors and you become confident.
And what do women say they like? Confidence. It isn’t necessary that a woman be impressed that a guy can, say, pole vault to nearly a conference record. The point is that he’s generally more confident than the average guy and that’s good. Attractive.
Back to the desperate guys.
Hard to imagine what advice would have worked. The traditional types seemed to have it so easy.
Easier to find, which is to say, buy various PUA systems, or even attend a boot camp.
I will also say that the worst cases weren’t those who were concerned about getting laid. The worst cases were the ones lacking an emotional connection with a woman, and wanting one desperately.
Besides the traditionally masculine guys who had it easy, there was another type which, except for being thick as a brick, would have had an easy, relaxed social life.
This group contained guys like ol’ Fred whom I had described some years ago. The idea that a woman might like them for who they were was so outlandish that it never occurred to them. They didn’t consider it and dismiss it and go around feeling sorry for themselves. In their emotional universe, the question did not exist.
This meant they did not fear rejection, since they did not approach women “that way”, but in various ways having to do with any number of other issues. Women would eventually find they could relax around these guys. Not entirely. They weren’t a hundred percent on the talking-to-the-eyes thing. But they were not needy–what would have been the point?–and they had other things going on in their lives. Which meant they became competent and thus confident. I know of a couple who missed fairly overt messages from women. Since the issue did not exist, the message could not be interpreted as meant. Had to mean something else.
One guy: “She kept going on about how tough it was to find jeans that fit her hips. What was I supposed to do about it?” Me, thinking, “She’s telling you to look at her butt, dummy.” I gather some woman finally grabbed him by the shirtfront, kicked him im the shins, and said, “Pay attention to ME.”, or something like that. Guy wasn’t even an engineer.
He had a hell of a lot going for him, except for a clue. Go figure.
On a different plane, if PUA tactics work half as well as advertised, then there are indeed buttons which, when pushed as advertised, have the promised results. I don’t know if feminists wold be comfortable saying that woman are by nature susceptible to such things. The alternative is that they don’t work. If they don’t work, they’re just annoyances, and there isn’t an ethical consideration. Pick one.
“Hmm, I wouldn’t have called that feminist. But what’s the point of impressing someone if you *don’t* want to connect with them? I mean, a debate club seems better to impress people with my conversational prowess, if it’s only for that, no?”
That’s the thing – what I read in Strauss’ use of the scripts, and certainly what I’ve seen in use by individuals within seduction communities, is a tendency to use a combination of scripts in order to win over the woman. I have often gotten the impression from PUAs that the primary goal is to impress the woman enough for her to want to have sex with you, with scripts used over one another as the key to achieving that. I found your use more feminist because it was less about “winning her over”, though there was an element of that – it was about facilitating a mental connection between the two of you, not only so that she would like you more, but so that you could know her more. For a lot of PUAs the answer to her question is not important in and of itself, but the fact that the question made her connect with you more is, because it’s going to lead to “winning” her – they think they’re saying “connection is important to sex and romance”, when what they are practicing is “I want to make her connect with me so that she will sleep with me”, connection as a key to open her legs, not “I want to connect with her because I find her interesting as a human, and connecting with her will also make the possibility of sex with her both more likely and more rewarding for us both”.
I really appreciate that this topic is starting to come up in feminist discussions because it’s something I’ve struggled to address as a (young, reasonably attractive) woman. How DO I want men to approach me, if not in the ways that they usually do? It’s hard to criticize what someone is doing without having a better alternative.
I just found something called the Authentic Man Program that might actually address this in a constructive way. It’s not speaking from a specifically feminist standpoint, but it is about meeting women for the purpose of having more meaningful connections with them. It also very much emphasizes mutual respect and incorporates women’s points of view. I haven’t looked through the entire site, but from what I’ve read it looks very promising. Might be worth a look.
I really need to just put this in a macro, because I get tired of repeating it: there are plenty of social techniques and games that work on people in general. Being as women are, if you can believe this, people, they are also susceptible to such techniques. It’s not magic.
The best comparison I can make is to compare The Gift of Fear and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Both discuss social techniques for dealing with people, but they describe two very different things. Dale Carnegie is much-maligned, but he actually talks about getting people to do what you want by giving them what they want – not because they’re suckers, but because that’s the best and happiest method of human interaction and is a win-win all around. Conversely, the techniques described (from the POV of warning people about them) in de Becker’s book are things that social predators do, and they’re also very, very effective. But they’re not something you employ to ‘cast your bread upon the waters’, as Carnegie might describe it; they’re things you do to push people around. “Negging”, by the way, is explicitly described as one of those techniques.
If it’s the case that women in this thread fall into the minority gender-atypical taxon, then the max percentage of women who would be similar would be 5-10%
According to a CBS New poll done, 25% of women identified as feminist: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/22/opinion/polls/main965224.shtml (more than that felt they’d gotten some benefits from the women’s movement). If I compare this to the Gangestad et al. study you cite, I have to at least consider the possibility that most self-identified feminists are “gender typical” according to at least some possible survey measurement of gender typicality. Since I get a missing page at the link you give, I’m not sure whether I, myself, am “gender typical” in Gangestad et al’s terms or “gender atypical”; I actually wouldn’t be surprised at either result, since “gender typical” seems to me to be a somewhat fluid term.
Graphite,
I think I understand what you’re saying – connection isn’t valuable as means, only as goal itself. I don’t know if that’s actually the case for men who are actually active in the SC, but I think your argument about the theory and practice seems somewhat plausible. Yet I’m not sure I find that problemaitc. It’s a bit like the pope saying in his first encyclica that sex without love is missing transcendence and is hence, well, just sex. Now I believe that it’s a huge cultural problem that most human societies can’t seem to figure out a way to assign sexuality in itself transcendence. Yet given that most people seem to operate under the impression that male sexuality isn’t something that needs particular attention given Playboy, most of this is focused on female sexuality – like the attempts to get rid of slut shaming. Remember how the recently published exploits of the Duke girl were largely seen as a positive expression of self-determined female sexuality? There certainly wasn’t much feminist concern that her doing so was morally questionable (the talking bit may be something else).
I think your argument is at least implicitly saying that being primarily interested in sex is not as ok for a man, because if getting laid is the primary motivation then the connection achieved will have been teleologically devalued. I’m not sure I agree with that, because I think it’s reaffirming problematic notions about male sexuality as such, and that creates, I believe, a sequencing problem – http://realadultsex.com/comment/reply/2631/17675
I also think that, in reality, the differences are never as sharply laid out as here -
I want to sleep with her, I need to connect to her.
I want to connect with her, and if sex doesn’t happen, cool, if it does, even better.
I mean, usually, people who meet haven’t quite made the decision about what they are interested in at all. If anything, I’d say, that one of the first interpersonal evaluations is “i’d do him/her/I’d not do him/her”. I’m not saying that people cannot connect without sexual motives, just that those interactions usually start without explicit approaching. Those interactions can become sexual later, of course, but I’d say that, usually, when people are approaching random strangers of the sex they’re interested in, it’s not because they’re looking for someone to play chess with. That background doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to become a sexualised interaction, for any number or reasons, but that’s how it started out. So would you say that connecting with someone in that situation is more valuable if the initiating person decides along the way that he/she wants to be friends instead of lovers? I’m not so sure about this.
Lynn, try this link for the Gangestad study.
“Neggingâ€, by the way, is explicitly described as one of those techniques.
Exactly. It’s a “weeding out” technique. The women who stick around after that have been pre-selected to be easily pushed around. Like thieves open house doors to see who’s house is unlocked. Why break in when you can walk through the front door?
I’d say gender typical is those that don’t stand out for being gender atypical, so by definition, most people.
In the 1950s, it might have meant women wearing dresses, and not doing so was atypical – but since it’s pretty ‘normal’ to see women in pants and shorts nowadays, its no longer atypical to not wear dresses, even a majority of the time, or all the time (formal events are usually VERY infrequent for me, and even then, pants wouldn’t be out of place usually).
A guy in a skirt, kilt or dress would be atypical, especially if that’s part of a normal clothes routine as opposed to a National Scots day or Halloween.
Basically, those considered atypical are usually getting negative feedback about it.
Someone would be considered typical for a woman if they; had unshaved head hair, no facial hair, no especially abundant or visibly long body hair (sucks for the darker-haired though, since arms tend to have longish hair, and black is visible on fair arms), wore more contour-hugging clothes than men (men’s clothes is by and large not contour-hugging except for very few exceptions) and had a not-too-low voice.
Someone would be considered typical for a man if they; had not-too-long hair (mid-back is too long supposedly), wore non-contour hugging clothes except for swimming and cycling if pro, had unshaved legs and arms (unless you’re a pro swimmer), wore sneakers or dress shoes pretty much exclusively (no sandals, no flipflops and definitely no high heels), avoided jewelry except for a manly watch, maybe a thick chain kept under the shirt, had short bitten or cut nails (no longer than the finger, at all), was free of make-up unless for TV or theatre (or other job requirement, like clown), and kept either clean-shaven or definitely-bearded, but definitely must be a sign of facial hair (shadow or actual hair), or he looks underaged (and yeah looking underaged is atypical for adult men). He’d also need to avoid pink mostly, and anything Hello Kitty/Disney Princess that he can’t blame his wife or girlfriend (or other female relative) for being near – fathers of daughters can be excused…when with them – he could pass for a pedophile otherwise…what with our societal paranoia about them.
I think guys can more easily fall into atypical territory, but that many if not most do their very best to not fall into it. Those that fall into it partially can be excused if they counterbalance it enough (long hair, big furnished beard). Those that fall into it heavily either embrace it or don’t care at all – they need thick skin regardless, given the strength of the policing in most subcultures (you could avoid stuff in certain subcultures, like the gay or drag or nerd or geek subcultures, but you got to cross more mainstream cultures in your day-to-day dealings, even if its only groceries and clothes shopping).
By contrast there are less possible offenses for women, but they tend to be more costly. You can try to counterbalance stuff, but facial hair is pretty much a one-strike-out if visible. The policing is generally less of a death-threat (women don’t get killed in the street just for being a little butch – men could get killed for wearing a dress/skirt/make-up in the wrong place), but can still demolish your social standing, and attractiveness rating, since it’s more based on external appearance.
I’d love if gender atypicality wasn’t so punished and gender typicality so rewarded. I mean what is it to others if a guy just likes that skirts are more airy and less sweaty in summer, and wants to wear some? What is it to others that a woman has some duvet on her upper lip? Less people interested? Okay, free will and all – but don’t beat up, harass and denigrate the atypical (I’m addressing society).
This is my perspective. I can get away with a lot more omissions as a girl than I could as a guy before. I barely use make-up, keep my hair unstyled (its down 99% of the time, without any hair product, accessories, or tie), and spend 5$ per year in shampoo (and got 30 inch long hair). I wear clothes I like much of the time without feeling that limited, or forced to wear things to not get beat up or laughed at. I wear sneakers much of the time, and if I wear heels, its cause I want to. My “maintenance” costs little time, effort, or money, and I’m proud of ‘living simply’, and I’m not an outcast for it.
As a guy it was about posturing that I didn’t know how to do, or had any interest in doing. Now its appearance, and it’s something I can skip most of the time, or that comes naturally. My attractiveness rating shot up way up…and all I had to do was take blue pills (estrogen). Some guys are naturally attractive too I bet, but that wasn’t me.
Just dropping in to say I’ve been monitoring, and I am very proud and grateful for the quality of civil, thoughtful exchange on this thread. Well done, all.
Basically, 90-95% of women work similarly to each in terms of gender-related traits, and 5-10% are wired a different way.
That’s not what the study said. From the study: “According to our estimates, 12-15% of men and 5-10% of women belong to latent taxa associated with greater degrees of homosexual desires and fantasies.” It goes on to say that half of those men and women in those taxa report as exclusively heterosexual.
So, how you got from that to “work similarly to each other” or “wired in a different way”—you’re not getting that from the data. The description of the questions (none were offered in that cite) were just of preferred childhood activites and of childhood sexual identity. There were no questions on current (adult) attitudes toward male or female roles, no questions on communication styles, confidence levels, questions on current career or hobbies—none of that.
That’s relevant to me because of what Richard Aubrey’s response is here: “Traditional masculinity isn’t a label without substance. It includes certain characteristics. These include increased interest in risk-taking, increased interest in testing oneself, increased interest in pushing various envelopes.
These lead to confidence, itself a tell or proxy for competence.
Which in turn leads to more confidence, which leads, as positive feedback, to more stretching.”
I agree with him about those characteristics. However, those are not exclusively male characteristics—they are female characteristics as well. Those are the characteristics associated with achievement. Women who don’t hold those characteristics are in for a world of constant struggle. I grew up knowing that anything I put my effort into, I’d better be at least twice as good as a man—I had to be above-and-beyond reproach, because not to be meant not getting any opportunity. I wasn’t going to be afforded the same “breaks” as a guy, full stop. If anything, that attitude is even more prevalent in younger women.
I also agree with him on how participation in sports shapes character and teaches lessons. There’s a reason feminists go all out for Title IX.
Get me? These are survival characteristics for the modern world. Not just for men. Women have our full hustle on too. It’s hard for me to imagine that a study done in the late 1990′s wouldn’t account for the large proportion of women who grew up participating in sports and taking part in other formerly “male” (now, gender neutral) pursuits.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that girls who participate in “boy” activities (sports, Legos, video games, fishing, whatever)—aren’t considered to be transgressing gender norms. Boys who want to try on makeup or dresses or play with dolls most definitely are seen as transgressors.
I’d say gender typical is those that don’t stand out for being gender atypical, so by definition, most people.
That’s sounds like a reasonable, common-sense definition. Also cosign to women having more latitude than men in this regard. A lot of what was exclusively or predominantly “male” environs or activities in the past are now gender-neutral; the same isn’t true of exclusively or predominantly “female” arenas. (y’know, the lower status ones. Funny, that…no?)
Sam I’ve explicitly approached someone without ever thinking about sex…It’s been more along the lines of I feel lonely I wish I had someone to talk to…hey this person looks fun… sounds like a random pick and choose…but really for me that’s what it was…I always thought of dating as taste testing…I always thought of it as a purpose to find OUT what I liked…not meet a list of requirements…
While they don’t get bashed or beaten for it, they do get a hit on their perceived feminity score if known (probably not Lego since that’s rarely something that people play beyond 10, while videogames, sports etc are lifetime stuff).
For example, many guys can’t think of ‘why’ a cute girl would play videogames. Maybe it’s projecting their sense of worth (meaning a lower than normal one) on girls, and thinking “How come this cute girl, who obviously must have a better social life, wastes her time on videogames – when why I play is because I can’t have friends/dates?”
So it becomes something that ‘doesn’t compute’ – cute girls have better things to do, so only average and lower attractiveness girls play videogames. And it’s probably a self-feeding self-fulfilling prophecy – playing videogames has long been considered an uncool, unsocial thing to do, and unfeminine.
And the female gamer crowd is mostly in the casual-gaming as a result – the attitude towards videogames (not cool, nerdy, unfeminine) makes many shy away from it, and there’s much less hardcore gamers.
Not saying I buy into this attitude. But that it exists and it’s a theory on why.
Similarly, a guy who plays so-called feminine games and pursuits has a hit on his masculinity…but being “less masculine” is not well permitted. I have various theories as to why, but the “girly stuff is lower status” is the least probable to me. It probably has a lot to do with ingrained homophobia against men with men, and little to do with actual women.
I was also thinking more of games and pursuits than dresses or make-up. I guess dolls works, but like Lego, it has some cut-off age where most girls grow out of it. Cleaning up the house, babysitting, those are stereotyped as only for girls (up to a certain age, when bachelor men realize *someone*’s gonna have to clean up, and they’re alone – most learn to clean and cook…or takeout, but the stereotype of “can’t boil water without a woman there” is a bit overstated – my boyfriend is the cook here, and I can handle myself, even if less skilled).
Male babysitters are extremely under represented. Just look in any movie or show where a babysitter’s mentioned, even an hypothetical one (ie “We need a babysitter for tonight”), and inevitably hir’s referred to as female. Males need not apply. I tried to babysit pre-transition, and ended up never getting sollicited by anyone else than my parents (a couple 100 times, but whatever – I HAD experience, lots of it, with young kids – but not strangers).
If I had to pick a moneymaker as a teen too young to find “real work”, it would have been babysitting hands down. Mowing the lawn is extenuating, and a job I basically avoided like the plague in my own place (my dad did it 99% of the time, I did it like twice). And paper routes were taken by men in cars (not that I was interested, I like my sleep). Babysitting is something I basically did weekly for years, as my parents went dancing on 1 or 2 nights a week, and I had brothers of 10, 3 and 1 year old at the beginning (I was 12).
I didn’t find it lower status…to me it was watching TV, being able to pump up the volume, sleep at whatever time (it was usually on weekends), while still getting the little ones to bed at their bedtime, and keeping them there (I got great at them staying in bed, by using fun). It asked for more attention than effort, and the only drawback would have been the length of time…if I wasn’t already home and not planning on going out anyways. I was underpaid, but with the advantage of being home, it was okay.
And why female arenas haven’t unlocked for men is partly because no one advocated for it seriously, and because some people are reluctant that men enter them. That’s babysitters, daycare workers (not admins), nurses, secretaries, models, beauticians (let’s say that being thought of as gay because of it is a turn off for many) and boutique workers – especially women’s clothing (not lingerie, just clothing…staff doesn’t enter changing rooms when people are in).
Status quo is king. If nothing is done to push the status somewhere, or those efforts are not concerted enough, the status quo remains.
In Japan, 33% of Japanese men mentioned they are/would be interested to take time off their career to stay home and take care of children, but that only 0.6% of fathers took parental leave. It’s badly viewed by bosses…and by their wives. Look it up, it’s a study referenced in the Stay-at-home father article on wikipedia, near the bottom.
I found it interesting (for Japan) and I wish there was information on other countries attitudes towards Stay-at-home-fathers – common sense tells me Canada and US are better, but not perfect, on that front.
For example, my own parental situation: My father lost his job at Canada Post around my birth, so he was caring for me for 0-10 months of my debut of life. He tried to find work again, got hired…my mom quit her job, before his trial period was even over, that paid about as much and became a stay-at-home-mom, she never went back to work, to this day (I’m 28 and my brothers are not in her care either, 2 of them are adults, and 1 is with my father). I’m not sure there was even discussion of who could or should stay home if anyone was to do it – she either felt pressured to do it, or entitled to the position, but nevertheless, it was clear my father never got a choice in the matter (though I’m sure he likes his work, he was a good father at home, too).
The article mentions that fathers who “freely choose” to stay home feel much better about it – which means some don’t and are thrust into it by circumstances or the choice of someone else in the couple. I bet it’s the same for mothers. Feeling forced to isn’t good, but wanting to is something else.
Feminism has opened that choice for women in the West more than ever. Yet the choice men have in the matter is less evident, overwhelmingly, they’re thrust in a provider role – and that’s part of why they can’t choose to privilege their quality of life, like women who work part time do (one of the main reason given for working part time was that – women are the majority of non-student part-time workers). Providers need to make big wages, and those big wage jobs aren’t all office-sitting cigare-smoking, they’re usually long hours if anything. Statistics about numbers of hours worked give credence to this theory (on average, men work 7 hours more a week outside the home – and that’s only counting people who work).
I want to clarify this.
What I mean there is that typically feminine activities are what men think average women do. So they might subconsciously think about such activities when they think of women (the concept), and seeing a guy do it brings a “He does like a woman, what if that makes me have feelings for him? Won’t I be gay?”.
Yeah, doesn’t make sense, but I bet a similar subconscious thing may happen for women…except that woman-on-woman relationships or sex aren’t viewed with near-universal disdain the way man-on-man is, so the hang-up is much less strong.
As to why this hand-up exists? It might go back centuries or millenia. I have no idea. Evo-psych theories is something I don’t give credence to.
And while the above reasoning doesn’t make sense…keep in mind that many guys think hitting (or even *thinking* this person is attractive) on a boy-who-looks-like-a-girl, a trans girl, a transvestite etc, makes them gay. The concept of “It’s a trap!” (brought to you by 4chan yay…) comes right from there – This trans or ambiguous-looking character will make you gay if you think they’re attractive. You’re “trapped into gayness”. What a concept…
Sam – I see your point. I suppose the distinction I’m trying to make is that there is something slightly dehumanising about using a script on someone with the sole purpose of sleeping with them AT THE SAME TIME AS not particularly caring at all about the kind of person they are. There is a sense of interchangeableness, that any hot woman would do, and therefore the answers to the questions being asked are irrelevant, because you don’t have any interest in seeing the person you’re hoping to sleep with as an individual, even though you do intend to make them feel as though you’re individualising and connecting with them. So I suppose my concerns are interchangeability – “one hot woman is as good as another to fuck” – and deceptiveness – “it’s ok for me to convince her that I find her personality interesting even though I don’t”.
I recognise that the first is not necessarily a bad thing, not necessarily an antifeminist thing – as far as a man and a woman are consenting adults, any kind of sex between them is ok, including the kind where both partners really are looking for just hot sex, devoid of emotional connection.
The second is problematic if combined with the first – not necessarily antifeminist, but problematically manipulative. If you make an attempt to make a woman believe that you’re seeking an emotional and intellectual connection with her, when you’re seeking only a sexual connection, and she acts in a way accordant with the emotional and intellectual connection, problems of differing intention and expectation have arisen. But if your other actions indicate to her that you are primarily interested in sex, or if you make it explicitly clear in some way, then that feeling of manipulation disappears to a great extent.
I can’t shake the idea that it would be problematic to be listening to her conversation and nodding along, pretending to be fascinated but internally thinking only, “Yes, she thinks I find her interesting! Now we can have sex!” But not necessarily because it’s antifeminist; more because it’s inconsiderate – it’s so very easy to lead someone to believe that a real connection is being forged, that one has gone beyond social niceties as preliminaries toward sexual attraction and off in the direction of a personal rapport, and if nothing is done to counter that impression, things get emotionally messy.
Plus, I suppose, I just don’t like the idea of someone pretending to find me interesting when they really want me to shut up so they can use me as a sex aid. Maybe I would feel quite differently about this if I’d ever been powerfully attracted to any person whose personality I found dull or unlikeable, rather than being exclusively attracted to people whose intellects and emotions appealed to me. I recognise that that’s not the case for all people.
I also wonder whether the outlook of “win her over” does damage to the aspiring PUAs – whether they find themselves less likely to seek connections because they’re focused on the goal of impressing their new PUA friends by seducing lots of women, regardless of how much interest they have in the women as anything other than a bragging right.
Hugh, if we’re going by anecdote here, my experience as a nerdy woman in that college environment was that there were a lot of nerdy men who preferred to focus on a) non-nerdy women and/or b) the few nerdy women who were at the higher end of the bell curve for being conventionally attractive. So you had a large contingent of nerdy women being completely ignored by nerdy guys, plus a large contingent of nerdy guys who complained they couldn’t find any female companionship.
mythago and kristina: If we’re going to trade anecdotes we’re going to probably disagree, lots of the nerdy men in my classes dated and married the nerdy women in my classes, and most of the nerdy women I know in my classes are already married. I certainly can’t say the same thing for most of the guys in my class – if I’d had to guess, most of them are probably involved, though to a lesser percentage than the women. We never had this type of “large contingent of nerdy women having trouble getting dates” thing.
I’m not sure why we’re getting different experiences. It could be a country difference – I went to school in Canada, and in particular Canadian schools don’t give significant scholarships to athletes so they’re not as prominent as they are in US schools, which presents less of a masculinity threat. It could just be a bias thing – certainly even the nerdy women I knew, since I did a lot of extracirriculars in college, were mostly extroverted. Sure, the conventionally attractive ones would get lots and lots of requests, but the majority were okay.
My guess, if I had to reconcile the differences in experience is that both your experience of lots of nerdy men preferring conventionally attractive women and my experience of the nerdy women not having lots of trouble getting dates is the same one – we tend to encounter more extroverted people than introverted people, so they are “hidden”. The most outgoing nerdy guys in my class tended to like conventionally attractive women, but they were also the most likely to perform conventionally according to gender anyway.
It would all be much simpler if more men simply adopted the Ron Swanson approach to romance.
“Strippers do nothing for me. I like a strong, salt-of-the-earth, self-possessed woman at the top of her field — your Steffi Graffs, your Sheryl Swoopeses.”
Of course, we would all have to grow the moustache. That might be a problem.
“mythago and kristina: If we’re going to trade anecdotes we’re going to probably disagree, lots of the nerdy men in my classes dated and married the nerdy women in my classes, and most of the nerdy women I know in my classes are already married. I certainly can’t say the same thing for most of the guys in my class – if I’d had to guess, most of them are probably involved, though to a lesser percentage than the women. We never had this type of “large contingent of nerdy women having trouble getting dates†thing.”
What exactly do we mean by nerdy??? There are lots of different definitions of nerdy, there’s book smart, there’s computer nerd, video game nerd, lack of hygiene nerd, doesn’t dress in abercrombie and fitch nerd…
it seems my school put everyone who wasn’t approved of by the jocks into the nerdy category…which basically was anybody who had the decency not to tease another human being maliciously. I had seen previous dorks get into the popular category because they started humiliating others…there were very few “nice” popular people, but even then they kept quiet when teasing occurred in order to keep their status.
“we tend to encounter more extroverted people than introverted people, so they are “hidden—
Actually, I always used to purposefully seek out introverts…the kid who always sat there alone at lunch was the one I would strike up a conversation with…I found them much more interesting…but they too would end up with the “cool kids”…but they did end up being the ones that didn’t relentlessly harass other students, but they didn’t speak up against it either…
LOL… when I look back at my high school years it was just like I get shafted in every which direction…I laugh because hey, I turned out just fine, it wasn’t the end of the world…
“except that woman-on-woman relationships or sex aren’t viewed with near-universal disdain the way man-on-man is, so the hang-up is much less strong.”
I’d say I disagree…there are butch lesbians and lipstick lesbians for a reason..one caters to male desire, one doesn’t. Perhaps that is the near-universal you are speaking of, but I’d hardly call that accepting of a person…just accepting of your notions of what you’d like to classify that person as…
There’s also masculine gay men and more feminine gay men. Masculine gay men often fly off the radar.
So I don’t think feminine lesbian women exist to cater to straight men. They exist because there are more feminine lesbian women, period.
Both of those groups might be accused of being straight-acting, even if they simply don’t carry an affectation and act in a genuine manner. Not that feminine gay men and masculine lesbian women carry an affectation for the most – they’re just more easily perceived (rightfully or not) as being gay or lesbian.
And sure lipstick lesbians are more accepted, but masculine lesbian women are rarely discriminated in the same manner feminine gay men are. Even the right wing mostly objects to gay sex with two men, and women mostly fly off the radar.
I didn’t say lesbian women were accepted, but that there wasn’t near-universal disdain directed at them. Disdain that contributes to hate crimes, bans on gay adoption and gay marriage. They might not want taxes financing lesbian artificial insemination, but that’s more economic than a “let’s protect families”.
They’ll say anal sex is disgusting (even if most people who do it are straight)…and don’t know what lesbian women do in bed. They’ll pop ignorant answers like South Park did, or just not have an idea and stay there so they don’t sound stupid.
“So I don’t think feminine lesbian women exist to cater to straight men.”
I didn’t say they exist to cater to, as in the purpose they have in their mind as lesbians…that’s the point.
One undeniable female privilege (I think even Hugo has recognized it) is the fact that lesbians are given far more leeway in terms of, well, everything, than gay men are- be they butch or feminine. If you disagree, you’re almost certainly a woman who doesn’t understand how male interaction works. Sorry if that offends you.
“Disdain that contributes to hate crimes, bans on gay adoption and gay marriage.”
Well considering that violent crimes are mostly committed by men, yes hate crimes are less against even “butch” lesbians, since the government is mostly run by men laws will reflect that such as the bans…it’s not that lesbians fly off the radar…it’s that since most men accept their notion of lesbians (portrayals in straight porn), it is accepted to think women having sex with women…that is until a “butch” lesbian comes along and destroys their notion of what a lesbian is…but I think that has more to do with the notion of woman than it does with the notion of lesbian…if you do not fit “woman” you do not fit lesbian…you fit butch.
Ordo, the only thing that offends me is your notion that I think homosexual men have it easier..I never denied the poor menzzzz their suffering… at ALL! I’m saying it is constructed out of straight het men’s own bigotry.
“Gender identity, more appropriately called sexual identity, is how you prefer your body to be configured. Some people have no preference (just go with what they got, and whatever). Zoe Brain has a theory that those “go with the flow†people are roughly 1/3 of people.”
Yep, that’s totally me.
La Luu said:
If you have two clusters of people, people in each cluster are more similar to each other (on the dimensions measured) than to people in the other cluster. If you were more similar to people in the other cluster, you would be in the other cluster.
In case it’s confusing, the taxa they found were based on the gender identity and child gender nonconformity scores, also.
As for “wired,” I use it as a blanket term for persistent traits, whether biologically or culturally induced.
The study used three measures, childhood gender nonconformity, Kinsey scores, and continuous gender identity. The second two are adult measures.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty standard for studies to not publish the scales they used.
LaLubu, re yesterday’s 7:24 comment: Don’t confuse junk science with REAL evolutionary psych. I’m an anthro student and I find the way some of these fools hijack legitimate studies to peddle everything from boob jobs to candy bars to be absolutely INFURIATING!
Oh, and female primates do tend toward heirarchical aggression diffusion arrangements. Ours has taken on a very different form from our non human cousins, though. I haven’t read it yet, but I hear Queen Bees and Wannabees gives a decent account. My favourite is still Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman. She leans toward Jungian, and I don’t really subscribe to innate personality theories, but her research is well-balanced and her advice is sound, imo.
I’m leaning toward the side of the haters on this PUA thing, but I’ll save my rant for later, when I’ve done more fact checking.
For now, I have a class with my favourite prof-crush. Wouldn’t want to be late
ttfn
I stand by what I said: there is no evidence in this particular study that an interest in “male-identified” activities correlates with non-compliance in “female-coded” behaviors (translation: “wall girl” doesn’t correlate with a childhood preference for dolls; the feminists on this board who dislike PUA strategies don’t correlate with playing tackle football with the guys). Not that there’s anything wrong with either, mind you. And in fact, the Kinsey score seems to correlate least of all—the so-called “gender atypical” in this study are 50% likely to be exclusively heterosexual.
But anyway…my main difficulty is “childhood gender nonconformity”, and how loaded a phrase that is. I have literally seen a sea change in what is considered “male” in my lifetime. Many formerly male domains are now gender-neutral or even majority female. That’s why the questions matter. The one question alluded to in the study was an explanation of changing “baseball” to “cricket” to accommodate the Australian sample. But…playing baseball is gender-neutral. Participating in sports is gender-neutral (sometimes, literally—as in, gender-neutral teams. That’s a big thing around here for singles to meet—co-ed teams and co-ed sports clubs. It would really be stretching the meaning of “subculture” to claim that all those folks are “gender-atypical”. Kinda like calling prime-time television an underground thing).
I could bore you with thousands of examples of the sea change feminism brought—but the point is that in order for feminism to have made those sweeping changes, there was a whole lot of women who were breaking through those boundaries. In other words, women who weren’t satisified with the limitations thrust upon them by others. Opening the floodgates changed the landscape.
In your enthusiasm to back up the PUA outlook on gender roles, you seem to be attached to the old landscape—the one that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m really having a hard time following you on this, because of all the prima facie evidence I have staring me in the face every day….that women really and truly enjoy activities previously coded as “male” (though many women are too young to remember that—they’ve never experienced a time when their favorite hobby was men-only), and still we’ve never questioned our own identity. I’ll say it again: when the majority of women can be described as “gender atypical” (as we probably could in the midwest), it’s not the women that need the adjustment. It’s the non-functioning definition of what constitutes “being female” that needs to be changed.
““wall girl†doesn’t correlate with a childhood preference for dolls.”
Definitely not…BUT she does correlate with the pressure to have a preference for dolls…and she may have had a “preference” for dolls, but the question is was that preference a preference or was it deciding it was easier than suffering ridicule? Feminism tries to remedy that question by making a “choice” a choice.
Graphite,
“The second is problematic if combined with the first – not necessarily antifeminist, but problematically manipulative. If you make an attempt to make a woman believe that you’re seeking an emotional and intellectual connection with her, when you’re seeking only a sexual connection, and she acts in a way accordant with the emotional and intellectual connection, problems of differing intention and expectation have arisen. But if your other actions indicate to her that you are primarily interested in sex, or if you make it explicitly clear in some way, then that feeling of manipulation disappears to a great extent.”
You’re right that we didn’t specify what exactly we meant with “connection”. To me, that wasn’t really necessary, because connection, to me, implies all three dimensions, the sexual dimension probably being the least important elemenet of “connection”, certainly at that point in the interaction, because, well at that point the sexual element of the connection is really mostly a matter of mental gymnastics, however mutual the sexual anticipation, at that point of the interaction, it’s really rare to *know* about the mutuality…
So bascially, what I’m reading in your reply is that a faked connection isn’t a real connection, and that faked connections are manipulative as they are attempts to trick a woman out of sex for “fake” instead of “real” emotions. So, yeah, sure. If someone is a con-artist, he/she is a con-artist. If something is a fake connection, it’s not a real connection.
In my impression though, which is mostly based on the book by Neil Strauss, faking emotions was considered fundamentally wrong. Instead it was explained that the ideal relationship type for a PUA was a 1:n poly relationship in which the aspired type of relationship was made very clear to the woman early on. I read this as – don’t fake interest to be her boyfriend if you only want to sleep with her or want her to be ONE of your friends with benefits, which, in other words would be your point about the connection type: don’t fake parts of the connection that aren’t there. What I’ve read in there was a concentration on the “heat of the moment”, not by promising a payoff in a different currency, but by making the moment itself irresistable.
I’m pretty sure that there are people who do fake all kinds of emotions, and I’m pretty sure that those who do will be interested in using all kinds of social techniques available, including the self-help literature from the SC. I also believe that the huge interest created by the book has led to an advice bubble fueled by assumed easy money, which, in turn, is likely to reduce the overall quality (and ehtical foundation) of the advice given – but Hugh may be able to say more about that.
But in my impression, in his book, Strauss never advocated faking relationship interest / an emotional connection when there was none. The opposite, actually. I think that’s also because it’s incompatible with his acquired/trained “I’m the price”-mindset – which is, in my opinion, another way of helping guys value their sexuality and thereby allowing them to at least believe they can be more selective and wait for a real connection (while the “average frustrated guy” would fake a connection to get laid).
If 18-25 age range victims are mostly victimized by other people in the 18-25 range, it doesn’t mean those victims don’t matter, or that they “brought it upon themselves”.
There are no borgs, individuals are unique. We can’t generalize from tendencies and statistical averages.
You can’t decide “most violent people are men” and conclude with “therefore, men bring it on themselves if they get beaten up”.
We’re all humans, so we should conclude that with wars and various atrocities that we are a masochistic race? People unite under the banner of ‘human’ for many things, but universal compassion or universal hatred are not one of them. Some people are greedy, some compassionate, some cynical (overall), and they’re from all possible age, sex, ablebodiedness, neurovariable, and race groups that exist.
Having problems or oppression in your life doesn’t prevent you from oppressing others…in fact, it might simply make you think “That’s how the world works, people above squash those below”. Not everyone thinks that way, for sure, but being crapped on is not an incentive to be stoic and compassionate.
It’s the whole “child gets beaten by parents, is not strong enough to retaliate against parents, so does so against school peers who are not strong enough to retaliate against him, and becomes a bully himself”.
Gay and lesbian people will often choose to crap on bisexual people, transgender people and transsexual people, because they can, and its a sort of “get back at you” misdirected.
The whole distrust/disdain that 2nd wave feminism had for trans people in the 1970s is about oppressing more vulnerable people, however enlightened its perpetrators claimed to be.
And of course, people can crap on people in their own group (however constituted), because there is no innate in-group solidarity, at best there is a feeling of in-group belonging.
People cooperate together when they view it as more beneficial to do so than to compete with others, it’s a cost-benefit analysis, redone for every group and every time something changes in the group. People who think they can do as good or better overall when alone, they view cooperation as a nuisance (rich people and taxes). That’s for most people, not all people.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty standard for studies to not publish the scales they used.
True, but it’s also common for studies that name their scales, as this one does, to use common enough scales that people can look them up. I was, for example, easily able to fine the Bem Sex Role Inventory (complete with how to score it), on the web; that was one of the measures referenced in the study, though not, apparently, the one they actually used in scoring their subjects to get their statistics about 12-15% of men and 5-10% of women. I was not able to find a full account of the CGI, the measure they did seem to be using to score adult gender typicality or atypicality, but it looks, from what I did find on the web about their measures, as if at least the adult measure they’re using measures mainly whether you perceive yourself as more like a man or like a woman. La Lubu, then, by this measure, would probably be “gender typical,” since she’s made it quite clear that she considers herself a normal woman for her geographical area, class, and ethnicity. This also explains why the study shows more gender typical women than gender typical men; as I think we all agree, the boundaries of “gender typical” for men are narrower.
I suspect you’d find a large portion of women who perceive themselves both as being more like a woman than like a man, and as being more straightforward than not; I doubt that 90-95% of women seeing themselves as mostly like other women correlates to 90-95% of women being Wall Girl.
Sam – I think that’s an entirely valid reading of Strauss, particularly if you are skilled at “reading between the lines” and grasping some of the things Strauss did not overtly state in the book. But based on some of the people I’ve seen turn to PUA, people who are not necessarily amazing at picking up subtle cues in human interaction or, perhaps, in writing about it, the book could have used a little more explicit stating of things like that.
Additionally, as much as I recognise that demonising the movement for a part of it – the cons and the dishonest manipulators – discussing that portion of the movement and what distinguishes them from the “good” PUAs is, I think, part of moving in the right direction in terms of finding a feminist way to approach the movement. We can’t stop at, “This writer never advocated it, so it’s not real PUA, just assholes using PUA for their nefarious ends”. I think we have to acknowledge that they fall under the PUA umbrella.
““most violent people are men†and conclude with “therefore, men bring it on themselves if they get beaten upâ€.”
I never said they brought it on themselves…you did…I’m saying if most het men are conforming to gender standards that are damaging then gender standards must go…DUH!
The ironic thing about Oppression Olympics is that it’s enforcing sex as an identity to gender, while opaquely hiding behind “equality”…Gay men are not oppressed because they are men…they are oppressed because of what constitutes as “men” in society..so when you imply that I think less of gay men’s suffering because they are men you are indeed still holding the idea of what constitutes as masculine…I would identify more strongly with a gay man than a straight man because our plights are the same when dealing with bigots…why the HELL would I feel less of their pain if I would strongly identify with them?
it seems my school put everyone who wasn’t approved of by the jocks into the nerdy category…which basically was anybody who had the decency not to tease another human being maliciously. I had seen previous dorks get into the popular category because they started humiliating others…there were very few “nice†popular people, but even then they kept quiet when teasing occurred in order to keep their status.
I think high school is a bad environment outright to do this type of comparison. For starters, I knew only 3 or 4 actual couples in high school. Most people don’t develop stable relationships during that time.
Secondly, my school strangely didn’t have much of a bully problem. As in, there wasn’t massive amounts of teasing in the school.
Anyways, I was talking about my experiences in engineering school where the M-F ratio is rather lopsided (while going to college is a relatively privileged position, it’s not a bad place to start.) I can’t say much about book nerds though I am very good friends with one – while I like to read I dislike book analysis.
“I think high school is a bad environment outright to do this type of comparison. For starters, I knew only 3 or 4 actual couples in high school. Most people don’t develop stable relationships during that time.”
I totally agree…but unfortunately it’s my only “personal” experience I have to draw from..other than jobs I’ve had, friends in college, and interacting with others before I became a mother..it may disqualify my comments from some people’s minds, but I hope not…I might not have a lot of active experience…but I’m a big people watcher…you tend to gain much more watching than participating.
“Anyways, I was talking about my experiences in engineering school where the M-F ratio is rather lopsided (while going to college is a relatively privileged position, it’s not a bad place to start.)”
My friend is in an engineering school and her background is superbly similar to mine…except that she had more moral support in her family than I did, and was considered less attractive than I was (but I was not considered “hot” by any means, especially not by my own standards)…She has lots of friends who are guys, but not one boyfriend…I’m not sure why she comes to me for coaching on guys…but she’s had a much easier time interacting with guys since, and also being able to shrug off the “oh no he doesn’t like me back.” that she used to feel in high school..She is currently experiencing that oh no again though with a serious crush…she knows my advice is sound and rational, but she also confirms her irrational fear that if this doesn’t happen it never will…
“The ironic thing about Oppression Olympics is that it’s enforcing sex as an identity to gender, while opaquely hiding behind “equalityâ€â€¦Gay men are not oppressed because they are men…they are oppressed because of what constitutes as “men†in society..so when you imply that I think less of gay men’s suffering because they are men you are indeed still holding the idea of what constitutes as masculine…I would identify more strongly with a gay man than a straight man because our plights are the same when dealing with bigots…why the HELL would I feel less of their pain if I would strongly identify with them?”
I can also flip this…gay women are not oppressed because they are women…they are oppressed because of what constitutes as “women” in society…so when you imply that I think less of gay women’s suffering because they are women you are indeed still holding the idea of what constitutes as feminine…I would identify more strongly with a gay woman, than a straight woman because our plights are the same when dealing with bigots…why the HELL would I feel less of their pain if I would strongly identify with them?
Now, although I am a straight woman most people at first glance and even in conversation would say I’m a lesbian…even those sensitive to gay rights…I don’t say they oppress me because I’m a woman…I say they oppress me because of what they think “woman” means, and since I don’t fit in that mold…I’m oppressed.
LaLubu? Who was that “I stand by what I said” directed at?
Graphite,
“We can’t stop at, “This writer never advocated it, so it’s not real PUA, just assholes using PUA for their nefarious endsâ€. I think we have to acknowledge that they fall under the PUA umbrella.”
oh, totally. Differentiation rules!
Xena: that was directed at Hugh, for drawing conclusions from that study that the study itself did not draw.
DIY (do-it-yourself) was popular even before the economic crash, and women went for it in a big way. Car repair, home repair and renovation…you name it—the growth in customers is mostly female (some more barrier-breaking). Among households where the car-repair is done at home, 34% of those doing the work are women. There’s a Girl Scout merit badge for basic auto repair.
Twice as many single women buy homes than single men. Yet…”buying a home” is still coded “masculine” instead of “feminine.” One in every three high school girls play sports on a team—and that is just counting school participation, not private teams (or more individual pursuits like martial arts). Half the students pursuing degrees in law or medicine are female (only 25% of engineering students are women…but that number is growing, not shrinking).
So…think about it. When anywhere from a quarter, to a third, to half of the female population is pursuing so-called gender-atypical roles in a big way…ways that change their lives….how much longer can you say those pursuits are “masculine”?
(like Lynn, I looked up the Bem Sex Role Inventory; I was unsurprised to see traits like “gullible” and “childlike” coded as feminine. Yeah, that’s some objectivity there, isn’t it! Kee-rist.)
@Hugo: in your original post you said “I haven’t spent much time around the “pick-up artist†(PUA) and “seduction†communities, largely because I find their views to be deeply demeaning to women (as well as men).”
I think a very good way out of this is to nix the qualifications. PUA really are deeply demeaning. But from a gender-conscious perspective I don’t think it’s useful to try and parse out who’s more demeaned by it.
Anyway, the bottom line is that a man who thinks it validates him to lie, cheat, distract, or otherwise bullshit his way into bed with a woman (particularly a “high status” woman) pretty much can’t have a whole lot of respect (self-respect or otherwise) to begin with. Neither is he likely to find much satisfaction should he succeed.
—
Also: “One of her many interests is focused on “bridging the gap†between the PUA and feminist worlds.”
This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. The public face of PUA is fairly alienating, and alienated, but in some of their closed forums a lot of the same people really dig into questions about gender construction and the pressure put on them. It’s worth noting, for instance, that for quite a few men, especially younger men, lot of the desperation to “pick up” women is driven by their own uncertainty about what it “means to be a man.” It’s also not uncommon for them to try and integrate their own authentic attractions, which may or may not be stereotypically heterosexual in the first place. In other words part of the appeal of PUA culture arises not from a desire for more conformity but a hope that through performing heterosexuality they can feel they conform at all.
As you and I both know quite well, Hugo, the pressure to perform masculinity is very intense, and not least because in terms of social and even physical safety the consequences of failing to perform it can be dire. If one believes safety and validation (not to mention an end to loneliness) can be had only through heterosexual success then things get even dicier.
I happen to believe, strongly, that feminism writ large is the best avenue for most marginalized men. And I think Clarisse generally agrees. The work required to get them over the twin walls of rejection build by both sides is daunting. But I agree with Clarisse that as the metaphorical crow flies the two sides may not be that far apart.
figleaf
(like Lynn, I looked up the Bem Sex Role Inventory; I was unsurprised to see traits like “gullible†and “childlike†coded as feminine. Yeah, that’s some objectivity there, isn’t it! Kee-rist.)
In fairness to Sandra Bem, who came up with that inventory back in the 1970s, she herself was a proponent of androgyny, and felt that for men and women alike the ones who fared best would prove to have both traits that she coded as “masculine” and traits that she coded as “feminine”; her coding of “gullible” and “childlike” as “feminine” traits probably reflected more how she thought the world saw women than how she thought women actually were or should be. It was also notorious around the Stanford psychology department, when I was there in the late 70s and early 80s, that Stanford had lost her husband, Daryl Bem, to Cornell, because Stanford wouldn’t give Sandra Bem a tenure track position and Cornell was willing to give tenure to both, so I doubt the woman who got her famous husband to move for her career would identify much with Wall Girl herself.
That said, “gullible” and “childlike” are of course no more “feminine” traits than “masculine” ones, in the sense that real women aren’t any more gullible and childlike than men (if you look at what people believe against scientific evidence, men and women on average believe different pseudo-science, rather than one sex being more prone to ignoring logic and evidence than the other is). Also, I think the proportion of people who’d actually see women as “gullible” and “childlike” has probably declined significantly since Bem came up with the scale.
It’s definitely more acceptable for a woman to be childlike than a man to be childlike. Not saying it has to do with innateness of the trait, but it’s still more accepted.
A woman can like Hello Kitty and have a pillow, drapes, tea cups etc with its effigy, without appearing weird. Having the whole paraphernalia (of which there’s over 2 million different items to choose from) is something else.
But yeah, my having a Hello Kitty pillow, and cover, and generally finding the character cute is not something affecting me negatively, at all, and I’m 28.
In Japan, the largest market for Hello Kitty stuff is…adult women. For sure it’s less acceptable in America to be an overt Disney Princess fan, but that’s also a testimony to there being less adult-suitable products. Hello Kitty has a vibrator (although not originally intended to be…it was supposed to be a shoulder massager), and cars, and private jets, and more mundane items like whole adult-dinnerware sets.
Paradox said:
I’m a big fan of AMP. AMP is quite respected in the seduction community (though a few guys don’t like it), which shows the wide overlap between it’s worldview and the values of many PUAs. I find that heartening, because it shows that many PUAs are interested in relating to women on a deeper level and doing a lot of inner work.
Here and here are a couple videos of AMP programs. Unlike many other pickup programs, they incorporate female coaches for feedback. The seduction community tends to be pretty cynical about the usefulness of women’s perspectives for men learning to date, but they seem to believe that women with the right experience can provide invaluable coaching.
AMP has many similarities to the mythopoetic men’s movement. It draws on quasi-spiritual and philosophical perspectives on masculinity and maleness. It’s a big New Agey, and talks a lot about masculine and feminine energy.
As an aside, I’m always amused by the ‘childhood preference for dolls’ thing. When I was a kid, boys always played with dolls. But they were called ‘action figures’, so that didn’t count.
yeah..LOL! Although this one boy in grade school was playing with “my little ponies” and everyone started whispering around that he was playing with dolls…when the whispering got to me I told them to shut up and get a life…this was at like 6 years old…and I didn’t even identify with doll playing, so it wasn’t like it was something I could consider personally offensive..
Huh, I had never heard of AMP, but I checked it out and it seems very high-quality. One thing that must be understood is that the PUA community is not a feminist zone. It needn’t be a he-man woman-hating zone but you’re not going to find discussions about the sexist expectations of women in heteroseuxal relationships. The men- many of whom are fairly unhappy- are not here for that and don’t want to listen to that. PUA serves to help men get women, and at its basis that involves objectification. I’m of the opinion that objectification to a certain extent is natural and healthy with a large dose of constraint and respect, but there it is.
“It’s definitely more acceptable for a woman to be childlike than a man to be childlike. Not saying it has to do with innateness of the trait, but it’s still more accepted.
A woman can like Hello Kitty and have a pillow, drapes, tea cups etc with its effigy, without appearing weird. Having the whole paraphernalia (of which there’s over 2 million different items to choose from) is something else.”
In line with mythago’s point about action figures vs dolls, I wonder whether a man liking model aeroplanes or toys from sci fi shows is that much less acceptable than a woman liking Hello Kitty well into adulthood.
Ordo, you make a useful point – most men in the PUA community are there for Utilitarian reasons, and many of them have far less interest in the theory than in getting any immediate help. A form of PUA created with feminist principles in mind would have to be something men sought out themselves, even if it were advertised on PUA messageboards, and I wonder how many men who are already in the scene would dismiss such an idea out of hand when offered it.
Now Graphite, you make an interesting point…does that mean it’s the responsibility of feminists to create a less damaging discourse that considers male sexuality, or that PUAs should be the ones trying to incorporate it into their techniques, or both?
Model-assembling is considered a hobby. It takes time, patience, and for certain models, money (the kind that most non-rich kids wouldn’t have).
Toys from sci-fi shows, well it depends how many. If you have all Star Wars action figures still wrapped in their original package, you’ll be considered a geek. If you’re less about collecting and have 1 or 2, you’ll be considered somewhat of a fan. But if someone has Cars or Toy Story pillows/covers etc, they’ll be considered childish.
I got a Hello Kitty cover and pillow-case. I also have a pyjama and t-shirt. And socks, sneakers and panties. I’m generally after stuff to collect that I’ll interact with in daily life.
The question might be: Why are there article for sale for adult women that have cute characters on it (Tweetie bird, Hello Kitty, cute pandas), while the men’s section is devoid of it? I see no Spongebob for adult men. It’s mostly sleepwear in the US, I can concede (for adults), yet men have dull stuff.
I had to search a lot for some of my items (pillow and cover was from e-bay…but it shipped from the US), yet it’s acceptable if a bit quirky, to people. Solely because females can get away with cute past 8, and cute is often childish.
If guys go the cute way, they’ll generally be considered too immature or too childish to be worthy mates. Women like me can even be appreciated for it (look up ageplay) in a BDSM context.
Some men want to dress their female partners as toddlers, or teens, because they look cute that way. Some women want to dress their male partners that way…to strip them of their power metaphorically. It’s more about being humiliated with the men (even if it’s only perceived as being such). Men lose their masculine attractiveness if dressed this way (which is about being adult, impressive, status), women don’t lose their feminine attractiveness (which is about looking good) – I think that’s the thing.
La Lubu said:
I’m not sure we are talking about the same thing. Plenty of women will talk about their relationships and preferences, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about women who prefer to engage in verbal negotiation over sexuality and consent. While there are plenty of women who will tolerate such communication, the subset of women who seek out such communication is pretty small and unusual, in my experience.
I said:
I’m not sure why you are asking me for citations for that claim, because I was simply stating my experience. Basically, my experience is that women who prefer explicit verbal sexual negotiation prior to sex are less like other women in many ways.
Your observations may be different. I have no idea whether the women I’ve observed who prefer verbal sexual negotiation are representative or not. Heck, there could be all sorts of women who prefer such communication, but do it out of my sight, so I never notice. (Similarly, I can’t prove that frat boys don’t secretly watch Battlestar Galactica out of my sight, even though my observation is that they don’t seem to be very into the show.)
Still, as I can tell, explicit verbal communication over consent is something that androgynous smart people (of either gender) are more likely to prefer than other sorts of people. I find that idea interesting, and I thought it would be worth discussing in this thread.
La Lubu said:
You are quite correct: this study doesn’t demonstrate those things. I never said that it did, but it looks like I’ve made you think I’m claiming something more expansive.
The main point we should take from this study is that women fall into two clusters based on gender identity, childhood gender nonconformity, and sexual orientation. The answers of 90-95% clumped together, and the answers of 5-10% clumped together. There are major differences since childhood between these clusters of women.
I also think this study leads to certain interesting speculations:
- If feminists (such as in this thread) are more likely to be in the minority taxon, they are more likely to be different in many ways from women in the majority.
- People who prefer explicit discussion of consent could disproportionately be in the minority gender-atypical taxon.
- The bigger taxon vs. the smaller taxon could map pretty well onto mainstream vs. non-mainstream subcultures.
From the rest of your post, it sounds as if women in the Midwest may score closer to the male-typical pattern on gender surveys. Interesting. If that’s true, a gender survey for the Midwest would ideally be based on how gender is expressed in the Midwest. Still, even with a standard survey of gender-related traits, I suspect that you would find average sex differences in the answers, and I suspect that within in each sex, the pattern of answers would clump somewhere.
Lynn Gazis-Sax said:
Ah, I think a lot of the confusion is here. It’s not that their scales were about “gender atypicality”, such that if you had a certain score, you would get assigned to the “gender atypical” category. That would indeed be a problematic methodology, and run into the problems you and La Lubu describe.
Rather, the scales were about sexual orientation and gender-related traits. Even with the childhood gender nonconformity scale, it’s not like they approached the study from the start with the notion that if you answer 17 questions a certain way, you get classified as “gender atypical.”
Instead, the scores of the people in the study were compared to each other. They found that people’s answers clustered into a majority taxon, and a minority taxon.
The people in the minority taxon answered the scales in a way that is atypical, not compared to some external notion of gender expression, but simply atypical relative to the majority of people in the study. We have no idea how the answers relate to a wider population. The study was done in Australia, and it could be that everyone there scored in the more male-typical direction compared to people somewhere else. But that’s completely irrelevant. The point is that a minority of people in the study answered the questions in a way that was atypical of the majority of the participants.
When the researchers checked their work by running correlations, they found that the two taxa they discovered moderately correlated with all three of the measures:
Those are pretty impressive correlations for a social science study, and they show that the taxa they discovered are meaningful.
As for the scales used: the reliability of the CGN was 0.7, and the CGI was 0.5. I don’t know which of Bem’s questions they may have used. But those reliability numbers mean that within each scale, the items were measuring the same thing and were inter-correlated:
This is why you often see psychological scales with items that seem a bit weird. Even if it’s not immediately obvious how that question is relevant, that question actually is tapping into the underlying thing being measured if the researchers did a good job of creating the scale and it has high reliability.
Ordo – if the men you speak of don’t want to listen to information that might help them, isn’t that like the person who says they want to lose weight, but they don’t want to hear any nutrition or exercise crap, they just want to get their 15-day Cookie Diet Package?
I’m not necessarily criticizing the design of the study; it may be quite well designed for testing the thing it’s actually testing (I say “may” because I’ve only skimmed it, and don’t feel qualified to express a more definite opinion on such a quick read). I just don’t think that, as designed, it answers (or is intended to answer) questions like what proportion of women are Wall Girl, what proportion of women will respond positively to the Game, or how far self-described feminists are similar to or different from women who don’t self-describe as feminist in how they see their own gender (at least the last of those three questions could have been answered, for a given time and place, by a different study, but this study doesn’t happen to be designed to answer that question).
As a thought experiment, suppose I took one of those inventories, let’s say the Bem one, since it’s the one that’s easy to find on the web, and applied it:
1) To myself.
2) To how I perceived each of the guys I’ve dated for, say, at least several months.
3) To how I perceived each of the last several guys I’d been attracted to (when single) who didn’t pan out.
Any guesses as to what the patterns would be? And how they’d compare for women who identify as feminists, and for women who don’t? Would the difference be sharp, or small? And why? Would you expect women who identify as feminists to be outliers, or, say, a little further toward one end of the Bell curve, but still mostly within a standard deviation of average?
Good questions, Lynn. For now, let’s just say that I expect that there are differences on average between feminist women and non-feminist women in certain areas. For example, feminists might be more likely to unhappy with feminine gender roles, because stereotypical femininity fits them worse than other women. I brought up the Gangestad study because I think it’s plausible that feminists are more likely to fall into the minority taxon that is different from the majority of women.
As a result, there should be some level of caution for feminist women to assume that other women have similar preferences in gender roles. There is a danger of the typical mind fallacy (seduction is actually an example from that article).
I would be interested in a discussion of how feminist women differ from non-feminist women, and what research has been done on feminist women, but I think that discussion is potentially getting a bit off-topic. I do have a post on that subject planned for my blog when I’ve done a bit more research.
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“I see no Spongebob for adult men”
I know they make spongebob clothing for men…When I worked Men’s wear in Target they had night shirts, boxers, and generally night wear…but they did have regular t-shirts too. Those items sold just fine…whether or not a guy wore them out in public is a different story…If a teenager was wearing it, it wouldn’t be a big deal, if a college student was wearing it, it might be a big deal, if an adult was wearing it, there might be a problem…I think this has more to do with assessing maturity levels in potential partners than it does with (I don’t actually know what you’re claiming…that men are oppressed?). Men are expected to be more mature, while women are valued for their “innocence”…I personally though always thought that girls in high school that wore Elmo t-shirts were immature…even the way they talked about it in school, they would start making the “baby voice” where it seemed like they flipped back a couple of channels into childhood…It creeps me out more when women wear “immature” t-shirts than when men do…I also tend to think the shirts marketed towards men that are very popular like the ones where it depicts a man getting married and the ball and chain are immature (appropriate for teenagers, not adults, at least not an adult I want to spend the rest of my life with). It’s not that I would find that person repulsive, but I would question how well I might get along with that person, but if I shared the same interest it wouldn’t really matter, for instance…I love a cartoon show called Dragon Ball Z while I don’t like many screen printed tees, I would totally love if this person had t-shirts, cherry action figures, glow in the dark posters, hell even a costume…I know it’s not what could be considered mature….but I love it too!
I’ve now checked out the Authentic Manhood Program site; that does look potentially good.
Hugh, problem with your approach there is that you seem to be starting from the assumption that ‘feminist’ is some kind of genetic feature rather than an ideology – which, based on your earlier comments about feminist women having deeper voices and so on, really does seem to be your POV, and this is strange.
For example, feminists might be more likely to unhappy with feminine gender roles, because stereotypical femininity fits them worse than other women. I brought up the Gangestad study because I think it’s plausible that feminists are more likely to fall into the minority taxon that is different from the majority of women.
Hugh, with all due respect, you have this exactly bass-ackwards. There may be a tiny minority of feminists who come to their feminism in that way, but….women actually live in the world, not in our heads. We have to deal with the conditions we live in, outside of what’s going on between our ears and/or behind the front door of our homes.
Most women come to feminism as a result of our experiences in life—full stop. Usually, long before we can articulate it, perhaps long before we’ve even heard the word “feminism”. In short: feminism is a reaction against the limitations of sexism, and more importantly—how following (for lack of a better term) the sexist path is not compatible with survival in the modern world.
Because regardless of whether a woman prefers a long mountain bike ride (coded “masculine”) to a long massage (coded “feminine”); she is going to experience sexism as an artificial limit in her life. Maybe not every single instance of it….but there is always, always going to be a barrier that she isn’t comfortable staying behind. Especially if it is getting in the way of meeting necessities. Some women come to that as a young child (“why can my brother climb trees, but I get in trouble for it?”), some as an older child (“why can my brother stay out after dark, but I can’t?”), some as a teenager (“it’s not fair that I can’t join my friends because my parents think I’m gonna go out and get pregnant!” or “just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I suck at math!! why do I always have to listen to ‘girls are bad at math’ jokes in class—from the teacher—while the boys giggle and I’m held up as the ‘exception to the rule’?”), some as a young woman in college (“WTF??!! Did my biology teacher just say that rape is easily explained as a mating strategy for lower-eschalon men?!! Seriously?!!”), some when they go to work—as either a teenager or adult, some when trying to buy a car by themselves (or getting their car repaired) from some sexist asshole that thinks “woman” equals “sucker”, some when they realize the religion they were raised in doesn’t accept them fully into the tradition as it does for men….do I need to go on?
It isn’t that some women have intrinsic, internal feelings or behaviors that aren’t compatible with more “feminine” role-playing; it’s more like the more “feminine” role-playing doesn’t give (most) women any advantages in the real world. Look up above at Richard Aubrey’s comment on the traditional traits of masculinity: These include increased interest in risk-taking, increased interest in testing oneself, increased interest in pushing various envelopes.
These lead to confidence, itself a tell or proxy for competence.
Which in turn leads to more confidence, which leads, as positive feedback, to more stretching.
Notice something? Those are all the traits that also lead to achievement, accomplishment, and success. Please don’t confuse my use of those loaded terms as referencing CEOs or captains of industry; no…those are the traits you’re going to need if you want to go from being a part-time sales clerk to full-time, or to get your foot in the door on the management track (whether “assistant manager” or “foreman” or whatever).
I mean, damn. We are embodied. I have yet to meet a woman who got her feminism from a book or seminar. All, literally all the women I know who either call themselves feminists, or live as feminists (believing in the equality of men and women) even if they aren’t keen on the term—got that way from life itself.
La Lubu said:
Who is more likely to run into the limitations of sexism and consider it a problem: women who have prescribed feminine interests and behaviors, or women who don’t? I fully agree with you that sexism impacts all women, but doesn’t it hit some women harder than others, especially women who want to step more outside the box? Women who want to be stay-at-home mothers are probably less likely to run into sexism in the workplace, for instance. Women who don’t have assertive personalities are less likely to be called bitches. That’s the line of thought I’m following, though it’s getting kind of off-topic.
Women who don’t have assertive personalities are less likely to be called bitches.
BWA HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! This is to die for!!!
I find it even more hilarious that someone whose nom-de-plume is “Hugh Ristik” is finding it difficult to grasp that feminism is the experience-based solution to sexism. For real. Did you read my post? The whole thing? Y’know, with illustrations of the sexism experiences of young children, older children, and teens? (I was shocked as a child to learn that the outside world considered my visual-spatial ability a sign of some gender defect, whereas had I been male, that ability would have been extolled as a virtue!) Stay-at-home mothers represent a small minority of women (you could say, the “gender atypical” ones!). Trust this: they encounter sexism even though they don’t have a typical workplace. And they don’t like it.
You aren’t paying attention. Have you never considered the import of feminism neatly dovetailing with the rise of industrialism and the rapid, sweeping changes that made in human society? That the old work-around-it conditions of sexism were no longer relevant? Women have never enjoyed sexism. Ever. But when the landscape of life changed, we changed with it—for reasons of survival (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs…you’re familiar with that, right?).
You seem to be under the delusion that women who adhere to “prescribed feminine interests and behaviors” are separate and apart from women who don’t adhere to those prescribed feminine interests and behaviors as well, or who also have “prescribed masculine interests and behaviors.”
The reality is that most women do both. And the further reality is that most of the so-called “masculine behaviors and interests” are more gender-neutral than masculine, if you look at the objective record.
Do you think the suffragists were “masculine” women, because they had the audacity to want to vote, not be treated as second-class citizens? Do you think the women entering universities after the Civil Rights Act was passed were “masculine” women, because they wanted to receive an education? Is every damn time a woman wants to act as if she has a mind of her own some sign of “masculinity?” Because if that’s the way you think—that agency and drive and creativity are masculine domains—then it is crystal-clear to me why you have had a difficult time forming connections with women.
@La Lubu
Hugh’s reasoning might be based on the fact that most male feminists are generally atypical and rejecting of many parts if not the whole thing – when it comes to gender roles. Male feminists who completely adhere to gender roles are…not considered feminist. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily more feminine, but they’re necessarily less masculine (according to society).
Similarly, I’d say that people invested in being feminist, identifying as such, and investing time online/offline into it, are invested in those roles either changing radically, or at least, strongly against the status-quo. More conventionally feminine women might not object to the role, and hence not seek to change them, even slightly. They might want to benefit from services instituted by feminists (DV shelters, Rape Crisis shelters), but that doesn’t mean they support the ideology – they support the idea of being helped as women, which is also chivalrous.
My reason for being against the status quo is that it is unjust for all. I want it to change so everyone can do/wear/express themselves however it is they choose (without harming others) without being coerced out of it or punished. Yet I don’t identify as feminist, because my focus is not *mostly* on women, it’s about equally on all…and with a slightly bigger focus on trans women and trans people in general given this group is ignored or vilified by many on all sides of the debate (not on this blog, but in general).
I am atypical, by the way. I don’t buy into prescribed roles, even if I appear as feminine, and I hate the restrictions placed on them. Being trans just makes me more atypical to others (regardless of my looks, orientation, philosophy of life). Though not all trans people are militants or activists.
Ok…going on the gender typical-atypical…I want to share my experiences.
As a child my birth mother would dress me up in gender typical clothing, and I could do gender neutral activities one such incident was riding a tricycle. I was riding my tricycle and for some reason I fell and got dirty, my mom freaked out and spanked me for getting dirty, and my grandmother (who took care of me most of my life) was appalled at my mother’s behavior and scolded her (though I remember nothing of the spanking or my grandmother being upset at my mom). My guess is that I associated wearing a dress with not being able to do things I thought were fun for fear of getting dirty (to this day I still have an issue with getting stains on my clothes and have anxiety attacks over not being able to get one out on the rare occasion that I do get one, and even when my husband or children get stains on theirs). Another time I was wearing a dress to school in kindergarten and a boy in my class looked up my dress to see my panties…I was furious and ended up tackling him..I got in trouble and was told that that was what boys do, they are naturally “curious”, where I saw it at even 5 an intense invasion of my privacy. I associate dresses with negative emotions, and it has lasted to this day, and has even stepped it’s bounds into tight clothing. In high school girls who were dresses were desired, and they also wore tight jeans and clothes and boys would comment on various body parts when they thought the girls weren’t listening, or even as far as right to their faces, and the girls would giggle. I would ask why they weren’t upset and I would hear boys will be boys, so the negative experience transcended into wearing appealing clothing…Fast forward to 19 when I moved out of my home to live on my own, I met the man that would soon become my husband, and he asked why I didn’t wear clothes that were typically feminine…I had no idea why, all I knew was that wearing those kind of clothes caused me an intense amount of anxiety…but wanting to please him I tried on some clothes he found appropriate…I stepped out of the dressing room, nearing tears, he commented on how much better I looked, and I fully broke out crying and shaking and having this feeling like it was the end of the world, like I had somehow “sold out” or didn’t feel like “me”. Can you imagine being that old and crying just because you had to wear gender typical clothing, even when it was my choice to do so? The looks I got for loudly sobbing over “tight clothing” was the most horrible feeling in the world…even the encouraging words I got from my future husband got associated with those negative feelings…
The point I’m getting at, I guess is that I don’t think it was innate that I wanted to wear gender atypical clothing, it was that because of gender roles and what was expected of me to be “feminine” (not get dirty, be submissive)lead to a negative association with those items. I’m not saying my experience is true to everyone, but my disdain for those items as far as I know didn’t exist until a negative association…My grandmother always said when I was younger I didn’t have a problem with wearing dresses as long as I was at functions where I wouldn’t have time to do the things I wanted like climb trees, or other activities that might lead to ruining my pretty clothes, and that I didn’t fully object to dresses until the incident at school where I was the only one who received punishment and getting scolded. There may be experiences that other women have had that they simply can’t remember what happened…I barely could make the association, I really just made the association today and no psychiatrist helped me with that. The only thing psychiatrists ever told me when I talked about how I didn’t like dresses was that I needed to rethink my sexuality and how that may be the cause of my anger…it’s a wonder I don’t hate men.
I’ve had a similar but reversed incident when a teen where I was scolded by all other students present for even holding a girl in a retaliatory way (holding her at collar level) while had I been assigned as female, this would have never happened.
The reproach I got was that this taller, heavier (I was small compared to all same-aged peers) girl was a girl, and you don’t hurt, hit or even look like you could hurt her, ever.
I’m a generally calm person, and have never punched or slapped anyone, ever. I’ve bitten and scratched, but that was elementary, and always in self-defense. This girl was extremely annoying to me and somehow always on my case. I was in a gifted 9th grade class, and so was she. Both top of the class, and her boyfriend too (was top of the class, in that same class). I just couldn’t take it, turned around, held her collar, and let go after 5 seconds…and everyone stared at me as if I had stabber her with a knife.
NO ONE had concern when I’d get beaten or treated like shit…because I had a penis.
So yeah, realizing being a boy wasn’t for me got a little help from being made to antagonize maleness itself, by other people’s chivalrous and sexist attitudes directed towards smaller/weaker males (ie no one helps you, you got a penis – so not worth the effort).
This wasn’t the cause for my transitioning, but it prevented my trying to fit in as a boy as much as I would/could have (not just this one thing, it constantly happened in smaller ways in my life, when younger). I was much more unwilling to fit in if it meant accepting that I wasn’t worth helping, defending or loving in itself, simply because of something between my legs, outside my control. I also had feminine body language and no great masculine-coded interests, which didn’t help one bit.
THIS is one of the BIG reasons today I defend males and want their gender roles more freer, their persecution for not “respecting the man code” gone, their permitted expression more wide. And ironically, it is what puts me at odds with feminism.
What does “Wall Girl” mean?
Doug, you came in late. Type “validation of male desire” into this site’s search engine, upper right. Scroll down the list of archived posts when it appears. The one you’re looking for is somewhere between 3 and 6 entries down the list. It was posted October 21.
Read the first hundred comments or so. You’ll come to understand after you read the discussion.
it may disqualify my comments from some people’s minds, but I hope not…I might not have a lot of active experience…but I’m a big people watcher…you tend to gain much more watching than participating.
I agree, and yet I don’t. You do gain more experience watching somebody than by participating (just because you may drown out some of the other person’s voice), but there are certain things you don’t get to delve deep into just by watching, unless you catch them at the right moment.
My friend is in an engineering school and her background is superbly similar to mine…except that she had more moral support in her family than I did, and was considered less attractive than I was (but I was not considered “hot†by any means, especially not by my own standards)…She has lots of friends who are guys, but not one boyfriend…I’m not sure why she comes to me for coaching on guys…but she’s had a much easier time interacting with guys since, and also being able to shrug off the “oh no he doesn’t like me back.â€
The guys she likes are probably just as terrified as she is. I think. Hum, this is a problem… maybe a mutual hinting thing? I don’t know since I can’t figure out why she is having problems, but it seems more nerves than anything. At least from your description.
I’m not talking about that. I’m purely talking about opportunistic terms. Male engineering geeks will probably have a tough time finding women in their circles/doing things that they like. I suspect female book geeks might have a similar problem.
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