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I think the idea of objectification has more to do with considering instances to be fungible. The typical PUA thinking about how to "bang the next hot chick" (which he phrases as "get a woman") is considering a small subset of women as completely interchangeable for his purposes, as if they were completely fungible entities like dollar bills or bars of gold-pressed latinum.
But as has been talked about recently, it's not the objectification alone that makes it icky, because we probably agree that there's nothing wrong with "we need to get a gardener". What makes the latter okay is why you want to get one: for a mutually beneficial business relationship. When we hear people talk about "getting a woman", it is usually not in the sense of entering into a mutually beneficial relationship, but rather in the sense of deceiving the woman into believing what they think will make her more likely to sleep with them (and then discarding them).
So to summarize, bad objectification is objectification for malevolent ends (simple test: does the object object to the objectification? In the case of the gardener or cook, probably not; in the case of a woman, almost certainly yes).
I can't speak about the "typical" PUA, but I will note that there are a fair number of PUG's (pickup gurus) who speak in the opposite way: that every woman is unique, and they love each and every one as a unique individual. Daniel Rose, Johnny Soporno, and Juggler are a few that come to mind right off. I was also under the impression that this is the attitude of many "naturals" as well.
My point about all this is that if you're going to complain about people speaking of general characteristics of a group that don't apply to all of that group, it'd be a good idea not to try to justify it by speaking in generalities about another group, when those generalities also don't apply to all its members. It sort of undermines your point.
Thanks for calling me out. What I should have said, and what I meant, instead of PUA is the womanizers that I've known in real life who value sleeping with as many different conventionally attractive women as possible and who have no scruples about how they do so and no concern for the women they sleep with that extend past sleeping with them once. They would say that every woman is unique, but words are cheap, and actions speak louder. In terms of behavior, what I've observed is that when they are in a large crowded bar, any of many, many different women is interchangeable to them. If it doesn't work out with woman#7, they just go immediately to #8 or #17 without missing a beat. Such is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique. Maybe I'm completely mistaken by believing that this sort of attitude is common in the PU community? [And to say it is common is not of course to say that is everywhere present and that there aren't exceptions.]
I have no idea about the PUA community; but from my own experience of times when I was single, there were moments when my desire for a relationship was a 2-place function (i.e. I was pining for this particular woman) and times when it was a 1-place function (i.e. I wanted to have a relationship with some desirable woman). Of course, I'd probably bomb with any girl if I'd admitted to being in the latter state, so there was some level of repressing my awareness of this.
I think that the things pick-up artists convince themselves they believe are kind of irrelevant to actual male psychology; to the extent that my experience is typical and honestly perceived, there are times and places when actual male desire is quite depersonalized, along with times and places when one can be more proud of what one feels.
I can identify too with the 1-place versus 2-place function analogy. Where I part company from the womanizers I've known though and that I had in mind with my comment is that even if I think of a generic "desirable woman", that's just a placeholder for a real, living, breathing autonomous agent. The womanizers, or the more sociopathic ones, at least, think of it as a placeholder for something to have sex with, which brings us back to the question of objectification and not respecting the agency of other people. I won't say that I don't sometimes succumb to what I'm deploring, but I try to catch myself and to do it less frequently.
Huh? Of course it is. If every one is unique, then surely you'd want to meet them all. Otherwise, you'd almost certainly be missing out on something.
In a trivial sense of unique, of course every person -- woman or not -- is unique because they do not occupy the same location in time-space. Just as obviously, we are not talking about uniqueness in that sense.
We seem to be talking past each other. I am saying that each person offers a unique experience of interaction. Some more preferable than others, of course.
Thus, the PUGs who profess to "love all women" state that they wish to have as many of those experiences as possible, and extend their contact with the women who their lifestyle is compatible with.
And AFAICT, their behavior is consistent with this. Soporno claims to have around 30 girlfriends at any one time -- all of whom are required to know and accept this fact, or else aren't allowed to be his girlfriend in the first place.
Rose states that so-called PUAs who only do one-night stands are depriving themselves of the depth and intensity of sexual and emotional intimacy possible in a longer-term relationship... and he also has been involved in "multi LTRs", though not to the same extent as Soporno.
There's a British PUG who talks about having dozens of female friends he doesn't sleep with, but goes clubbing with.. and they help him "chat up" the women he does intend to sleep with. Many other PUGs lecture guys on the importance of genuinely being interested in women and wanting to spend time on them, because if you don't , then it's sort of a waste to spend time learning how to talk to them.
Meanwhile, PUG Eben Pagan (stage name "David DeAngelo", author of the "Double Your Dating" product line) has spoken in his marketing classes about his typical customer really just wanting to know how to talk to a woman and ask her out without being embarrassed... and since his is probably the largest internet dating advice business out there (at $20million annual gross), I would guess that means that most guys buying "pickup" training just want to learn how to talk to someone they're attracted to without feeling like an idiot... not how to say some magic words and get laid. Other gurus have also noted that most of the men in their classes are looking for "the one" -- they just want to know what to say when they meet her, and they know they're not going to meet her by sitting at home and not talking to anybody.
So, all of this strikes me as a considerable amount of evidence in favor of the proposition that there are a significant number of men who actually do believe each woman is unique, are not primarily interested in one-night stands, and yet also believe in knowing what they're doing, and/or meeting more than one woman.
You're completely changing the topic.
I said that womanizers I have known consider women interchangeable, because in their plot to sleep with as many women as possible, they ever so easily substitute one for another when their moves fail on the current target. I said that is not the behavior of someone who thinks every woman is unique.
You said of course they consider all women to be unique, because "If every one is unique, then surely you'd want to meet them all. "
I pointed out that you're equivocating on unique, and now you're changing the topic again.
No, I said that the behavior you described is consistent with considering all women to be unique. And it is. It just also happens to be consistent with the behavior of a jerk.
How is that changing topic?
The topic change is that when I made the uniqueness comment, I was talking about womanizers I've known, not PUA or famous PUA gurus. Secondly, you keep equivocating on unique. Of course every person offers a unique experience of interaction. They are also all made out of utterly unique particles in utterly different configurations and no two of them have ever precisely occupied the same locations in time-space. That's all irrelevant for the sense of uniqueness I explained, which has do with behavior and interchangeability.
The way in which I've said that womanizers I've known do not behave as if women are unique is that when they go out clubbing, if they're with a bunch of friends, they're quite willing to draw straws to see which of the potential women they get to chat up, and they hardly care which of many attractive women they get to go home with, as long as they go home with one of them, for they consider them not to be unique in the requisite sense of being attractive and willing to sleep with them. Sure they're all different, but the differences are irrelevant to them, except possibly as a strategy to use for seducing the woman in question.
And you're still missing my point: the behavior you describe can be generated by many different beliefs or perceptions internal to the person generating the behavior, and you cannot know (unless you ask, or at least perform a more detailed test than the one you've desribed) whether the person is willing to meet many different women because he does -- or does not -- consider them unique.
That is, until you ask, you can't know whether his thought process is, "Every woman is unique, so no matter who I meet it will be a fun and interesting experience to discover what she's like," or else something so crude I won't render it into actual words here.
What I have been pointing out is that there are people who state, teach, and promote the mindset I have spelled out here. Certainly, there are people of the other mindset, and disagreeable as it might be, I don't argue with the fact that mindset also exists. You seem to be denying, however, that the more enlightened mindset also exists.
I don't think so. The behavior of "if at first you don't succeed" has obvious empirical backing, but there is more than one attitude that can generate that same behavior.
Some of those attitudes (like, "I'm a fun person and I like to meet a lot of new and interesting people", or "women are fascinating and I want to meet them all") have MUCH better effects on the person holding them, as well as better effects on the people they come into contact with.
You provided no empirical data. You made a rather vague claim about some supposed empirical data, and its reason-providing nature. Did you have, say, a study or something to back you up?
I didn't vote you down, but I did just vote up to correct what I think was an inappropriate downvote, but perhaps the person downvoted for alluding to "good, empirical" reasons but not spelling them out. I've noticed comments that allude to things without elaborating giving any detail whatsoever often get voted down.