SarahC:

Actually, “pretending to be sexy,” aka projecting confidence, social dominance, good looks, etc., doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I know a lot of PUA focuses on stuff like that, and I think that’s great; I’ve seen it have a positive influence on friends of mine, and vastly improve their lives, without compromising their ethics. I think this sort of training falls under "self-improvement," and I think it's an unalloyed good thing, and from what I can tell, this is exactly what you've been teaching and promoting.

Glad to see that we are on the same page on this point.

I’m bothered by what I think of as “compliance tricks,” which I’ve also seen recommended in a PUA context.

PUAs indeed use some compliance techniques. Here are a few hypotheses why:

• PUAs use compliance techniques because (whether PUAs realize or not) they induce vulnerable women to go along with sexual activity that they are unenthusiastic about, or outight do not want
• Certain behavior that induce compliance are attractive to some women (e.g. dominance and status behaviors, giving minor orders)
• For some women, a side effect of behavior that attracts them is that is also induces compliance. Therefore, you can test attraction by testing compliance as a proxy. Hence compliance tests like "give me your hand for a sec...", which could also be called "attraction tests."

I suspect that all these factors underlie the use of compliance in pickup.

That is, when you get someone to do things that she doesn’t want or like, using commitment effects and manipulating her own guilt, awkwardness, and desire to please.

We recently had a similar conversation on Clarisse Thorn's blog, discussing the case of the PUA David X, described in The Game p. 146:

His philosophy was to never lie to a female. He prided himself on bedding women by trapping them with their own words. For example, on meeting a girl at a bar, he'd get her to say that she was spontaneous and didn't have any rules; then, if she was reluctant to leave the bar with him, he'd say, "I thought you were spontaneous. I thought you did what you wanted."

Do I like this tactic? No. Can I imagine a woman find this manipulative? Yes. Can I imagine a woman going along with him out of "manipulation"? Maybe. Yet his "trap" is so transparent that it lacks the underhanded component many people associate with "manipulation." It's a lot easier to imagine a woman perceiving his approach as assholish. I can even imagine some women perceiving it as flirtatious.

I think this is why there’s a lot of feminist talk about “No means no” and consent and so on – because women are socialized to try to please people and go along with others’ desires, and can be put in harmful situations by people who take advantage of their reluctance to give a direct “No.”

As someone who has had to work a lot on my assertiveness, and who still sometimes has trouble saying "no," I sympathize. I've run into enough men with similar challenges that I am not convinced that "people-pleasing" behavior is heavily gendered. The difference is that men tend to end up in the role of sexual initiator, making the people-pleasing behavior of women more pivotal in sexuality.

The difficulty that some women have saying "no" needs to be taken seriously. Yet what exactly are its ethical implications? How do we define ethical disjunctions that don't prohibit any sort of initiating?

Unfortunately, it's quite possible that there is a nontrivial overlap between (a) male behaviors that some women find attractive, and (b) male behaviors that some women go along with out of vulnerability, difficulty saying "no," pressure, or people-pleasing. Some women have trouble saying "no," and other women have trouble saying "yes" (and of course, some women probably have trouble saying either). Some women prefer advances that other women have trouble saying "no" to. Some women prefer advances that other women have trouble saying "yes" to.

Imagine being a guy thinking about these possibilities... then try to go out on a date and make a move.

Women don't come with manuals describing exactly what sort of advances they find sexy, and what sort they comply with in order to people-please... so men have to guess. It's possible to make better guesses about women's sexual psychology, but that takes practice and experience.

For every male advance, we could invent a hypothetical woman who would have trouble refusing it. Make an assertive advance? Some women might feel pressured. Make an extremely polite and hesitant advance (even asking permission)? Some women might go along with it (without wanting it) merely because she doesn't want to make you feel bad.

This guessing requirement could cause a screwed up incentive structure. Imagine that 40% of women strongly prefer a type of advance that 10% of women have trouble saying "no" to. Ethics aside, the dominant strategy in conditions of uncertainty is to use that advance, which would be harmful to 10% of women. You could be a good person and not use it... but then you throw out 40% of women as dating options. Meanwhile, you sit and watch the guys who play the dominant strategy make out like bandits and surpass you in experience with women. Now imagine another type of advance, except that 75% of women strongly prefer it, and 5% have trouble saying "no." Then another advance, there 90% of women strongly prefer it, and 1% have trouble saying "no" to it. Or how about an advance that 99.9% prefer, and 0.1% have trouble saying "no" to; do men need to relinquish this one, too?

At what point are men allowed to get off that train of ethical thought before it reaches its destination of saintly celibacy? What's the cutoff point where a man has sufficiently minimized the probability of inducing a woman to comply with him sexually out of people-pleasing or difficulty saying "no"?

Reflecting on the massive diversity of female preferences and assertiveness about their boundaries can be frightening to many men. To my high school version, the thought of a woman having trouble saying "no" was so compelling that I never asked anyone out, at all (some people on LW might consider this idea a "basilisk").

Maybe that in itself isn’t a crime; maybe unfulfilling, not-quite-desired sex isn’t the worst thing in the world; but as a general rule, I think compliance tricks are pretty disturbing.

Some behavior under the label "compliance tricks" is disturbing. Yet it can be difficult to define where compliance tactics end, and normal social interaction begins. Furthermore, whether behavior is a "compliance tactic" isn't always an objective feature of the behavior: for many behaviors, it depends on the other person, and on context. As discussed above, women vary vastly in what behaviors compel them.

Is David X's "I thought you were adventurous?" a compliance tactic, or is it him being an obvious asshole, or is it flirting? Is "sit on my lap?" a "compliance tactic"? How about "call me tomorrow around 6"? Any type of request can induce compliance in someone with sufficiently low boundaries. How do we distinguish between unethical "compliance tactics", and ethical sorts of advances and requests?

continued...