What about all the PUA stuff? I know nothing more of it than has been discussed here and from looking around their web sites, but it's been spoken of with approval by some here and on OB. ...
Yes, people who could actually use the advice appreciate hearing it. I'm talking about disapproval from society in general. There is no widely-accepted, effective advice that you can openly talk about for how to attract women, like there is for women wanting to attract men. PUA is a recent development that is slowly allowing men to work around this problem, but its effectiveness will always be officially denied in polite company, no matter how much evidence accumulates.
If "society" doesn't lay out a red carpet for you it's deliberately doing you down? Sorry, but it isn't anyone else's responsiblity to solve your problem. You solve it yourself, or not. Resources are out there, and pretending they aren't and whining about how if it wasn't for "society ...
Yikes! Putting words into my mouth there? Let's see, I didn't claim there are no resources, I didn't aim to justify any of my personal failings, I didn't claim that society has to throw out a red carpet for every idea. However, there is a very real problem for men in general, and it's ridiculous to equate any discussion of that with excuse-making.
For what it's worth, I am most certainly not retiring to my cave on this issue, and in no sense have I given up. I have, in fact, availed myself of the resources you mentioned. Though I won't publicly go into much detail, it proved my suspicions right -- the course assumed a prerequisite level of implicit social knowledge that I didn't have. Fortunately, I got a refund and have been developing in that area. As the thread Hugh linked shows, my efforts have led to a date, so I most certainly not taking the attitude you have so rudely ascribed to me.
And so you believe that any time a man asks a woman out and she declines, he gets labelled a pervert and badmouthed to all her friends. That is actually not how things work in the world outside your head. Offers amicably made and amicably declined happen all the time.
Again, putting words into my mouth. I never claimed that this happens every time, I don't believe it happens every time, and it wasn't necessary for my point that it happens every time. All that's necessary is that the risk be too high. If you've never had that problem, good for you -- you're a natural, or learned the appropriate protocols from the appropriate people. That's still no reason to deny the existence of the problem for others.
BTW, minor quibble (or major truth, depending on how far you pull on the loose thread): there is no such thing as a feeling of rejection. There is only the fact of being turned down (if it happens), and whatever attitude you decide to take about it.
Nope, there's also the change in other people's behaviors and beliefs about me that result from a failed attempt, which I cannot alter merely by changing my view of how I was turned down; ignoring this fact on the basis of some rugged "I choose my attitude" is simplistic, and ignorant of the relevant factors.
This is part 1 of a sequence on problem solving. Here is part 2.
It is a critical faculty to distinguish tasks from problems. A task is something you do because you predict it will get you from one state of affairs to another state of affairs that you prefer. A problem is an unacceptable/displeasing state of affairs, now or in the likely future. So a task is something you do, or can do, while a problem is something that is, or may be. For example:
Problems are solved by turning them into tasks and carrying out those tasks. Turning problems into tasks can sometimes be problematic in itself, although small taskifications can be tasky. For instance, in the peanut butter sandwich case, if your only missing component for sandwich-making is bread, it doesn't take much mental acrobatics to determine that you now have two tasks to be conducted in order: 1. obtain bread, 2. make sandwich. Figuring out why you're sad, in case two, could be a task (if you're really good at introspecting accurately, or are very familiar with the cousin-missing type of sadness in particular) or could be a problem (if you're not good at that, or if you've never missed your favorite cousin before and have no prior experience with the precise feeling). And so on.
Why draw this distinction with such care? Because treating problems like tasks will slow you down in solving them. You can't just become immortal any more than you can just make a peanut butter sandwich without any bread. And agonizing about "why I can't just do this" will produce the solution to very few problems. First, you have to figure out how to taskify the problem. And the first step is to understand that you have a problem.
Identifying problems is surprisingly difficult. The language we use for them is almost precisely like the language we use for tasks: "I have to help the exchange student learn English." "I have to pick up milk on the way home from school." "I have to clean the grout." "I have to travel to Zanzibar." Some of these are more likely to be problems than others, but any of them could be, because problemhood and taskiness depend on factors other than what it is you're supposed to wind up with at the end. You can easily say what you want to wind up with after finishing doing any of the above "have to's": a bilingual student, a fridge that contains milk, clean grout, the property of being in Zanzibar. But for each outcome to unfold correctly, resources that you might or might not have will be called for. Does the exchange student benefit most from repetition, or having everything explained in song, or do you need to pepper your teaching with mnemonics? Do you have cash in your wallet for milk? Do you know what household items will clean grout and what items will dissolve it entirely? Where the hell is Zanzibar, anyway? The approximate ways in which a "have to" might be a problem are these:
So when you have to do something, you can tell whether it's a problem or a task by checking whether you have all of these things. That's not going to be foolproof: certain knowledge gaps can obscure themselves and other shortfalls too. If I mistakenly think that the store from which I want to purchase milk is open 24 hours a day, I have a milk-buying problem and may not realize it until I try to walk into the building and find it locked.
Part 2 of this sequence will get into what to do when you have identified a problem.