Clarisse Thorn recently posted a useful article about Ethical Pick-Up Artistry, bringing up a few basic critiques of traditional PUA and suggesting a few alternatives.
Here’s the thing: the current pickup artist subculture has a monopoly on effective advice for how to break down social interactions and talk to women. Not all of it works, but enough of it works that it draws guys in. As a pickup artist instructor once told me, “When I first found the community I was horrified by how sleazy and gross it is, but I had never had a girlfriend and I told myself: dude, if you don’t learn this stuff you’re gonna die alone.”
I’ve theorized that maybe feminists should provide good pickup advice, in an attempt to counterbalance some of the awfulness of the existing community. In the meantime, however, I figure the next best thing to do is to provide a list of less-misogynistic pickup artist instructors and sites, and a few very basic critiques.
A proposal to formalize this Not the same thing, but a discussion on forming a community to practice social artistry in general has been brought up on LW before, but I'm not personally aware of anything coming out of that.
I think I need more help seeing why I should think the links you provide are examples of Not Good Things.
Most of his blog is devoted to how husbands can be more attractive to their wives. Coming to the blog for the first time, its natural to miss his explanation that for April he is focusing on 'Girl Game' (link). Partially for a change of pace and partially because he's gotten requests for it from commenters. I can easily see how this would be off putting if this is the first thing you see. Given this context, do you still see this as problematic?
Boiling down to putting out: Yes, he mentions 'wife putting out more' as the consequence of raising the husband's relative mate value more than anything else, but the mechanism he describes is that the wife wants to have more sex, which doesn't seem terribly problematic to me. Elsewhere he talks about doing things to build comfort in a relationship. Do you find any of the behaviors suggested in that link problematic? Is your notion that too much focus on sex is problematic?
Whining: I am sympathetic to your link. I think a lot of this kind of discussion is really about word choice. If you reframe nice vs. jerk as passive vs. active or non-aggressive vs. aggressive, I think a lot of discussion would dissolve. If passive vs. active (or somesuch) was the framing used, do you think this would be less problematic? Perhaps such discussions need comments like "guys think they're being nice, but they're really just being passive, and that's often not attractive"?
Clarisse Thorn recently posted a useful article about Ethical Pick-Up Artistry, bringing up a few basic critiques of traditional PUA and suggesting a few alternatives.
A proposal to formalize thisNot the same thing, but a discussion on forming a community to practice social artistry in general has been brought up on LW before, but I'm not personally aware of anything coming out of that.